In the eighteenth century, chemistry was transformed from an art to a public science. Chemical affinity played an important role in this process as a metaphor, a theory domain, and a subject of investigation. Goethe's Elective Affinities, which was based on the current understanding of chemical affinities, attests to chemistry's presence in the public imagination. In Affinity, That Elusive Dream, Mi Gyung Kim restores chemical affinity to its proper place in historiography and in Enlightenment public culture.
In the mid to late 1890s, J. J. Thomson and colleagues at Cambridge's Cavendish Laboratory conducted experiments on "cathode rays" (a form of radiation produced within evacuated glass vessels subjected to electric fields)—the results of which some historians later viewed as the "discovery" of the electron. This book is both a biography of the electron and a history of the microphysical world that it opened up.
From the days of the alchemists through the creation of the modern laboratory, chemistry has been defined by its instruments and experimental techniques. Historians, however, have tended to focus on the course of chemical theory rather than on the tools and experiments that drove the theory. This volume moves chemical instruments and experiments into the foreground of historical concern, in line with the emphasis on practice that characterizes current work on other fields of science and engineering.
edited by Martha V. Gottron Chemical engineering has been one of the major high-tech growth industries of the post-World War II period, and one of the few in which U.S. companies have retained an international advantage over their competitors.
These 28 contributions by leading researchers - from such diverse disciplines as chemistry, biology, physics, mathematics, and physiology - describe recent experiments, numerical simulations, and theoretical analyses of the formation of spatial patterns in chemical and biological systems.
J. D. Bernal's monumental work Science in History is the first full-scale attempt to analyze the relationship between science and society throughout history, from the perfection of the first flint hand ax to the construction of the hydrogen bomb. This remarkable study illustrates the impetus given to and the limitations placed upon discovery and invention by pastoral, agricultural, feudal, capitalist, and socialist systems, and conversely the ways in which science has altered economic, social, and political beliefs and practices.
This important philosophical statement by an eminent scientist is written with such clarity and directness, and derives from so broad a humanistic perspective, that the thoughtful reader will find it as rewarding as it is instructive. The author's purpose in this undertaking is to:
The word "nomogram," meaning the "law in graphical form," properly includes alignment diagrams, network charts, and many other graphical forms. By the 1950s, the term "nomogram" came to refer to alignment diagrams exclusively. In this first broad compiling of American nomograms, approximately seventeen hundred alignment diagrams, network charts, and other graphical forms from 97 technical journals are presented, conveniently indexed. Only those technical periodicals were searched which patently favored the publication of this type of diagram.
