Browse

This book explores the role of causal constraints in science, shifting our attention from causal relations between individual events—the focus of most philosophical treatments of causation—to a broad family of concepts and principles generating constraints on possible change. The book looks at determinism, locality, stability, symmetry principles, conservation laws, and the principle of least action—causal constraints that serve to distinguish events and processes that our best scientific theories mandate or allow from those they rule out. The book's approach reveals that causation is just as relevant to explaining why certain events fail to occur as it is to explaining events that do occur. It investigates the conceptual differences between, and interrelations of, members of the causal family, thereby clarifying problems at the heart of the philosophy of science. The book argues that the distinction between determinism and stability is pertinent to the philosophy of history and the foundations of statistical mechanics, and that the interplay of determinism and locality is crucial for understanding quantum mechanics. Providing a historical perspective, the book traces the causal constraints of contemporary science to traditional intuitions about causation, and demonstrates how the teleological appearance of some constraints is explained away in current scientific theories such as quantum mechanics. The book represents a bold challenge to both causal eliminativism and causal reductionism—the notions that causation has no place in science and that higher-level causal claims are reducible to the causal claims of fundamental physics.

The birth and evolution of our solar system is a tantalizing mystery that may one day provide answers to the question of human origins. This book tells the remarkable story of how the celestial objects that make up the solar system arose from common beginnings billions of years ago, and how scientists and philosophers have sought to unravel this mystery down through the centuries, piecing together the clues that enabled them to deduce the solar system's layout, its age, and the most likely way it formed. Drawing on the history of astronomy and the latest findings in astrophysics and the planetary sciences, the book offers the most up-to-date and authoritative treatment of the subject available. It examines how the evolving universe set the stage for the appearance of our Sun, and how the nebulous cloud of gas and dust that accompanied the young Sun eventually became the planets, comets, moons, and asteroids that exist today. It explores how each of the planets acquired its unique characteristics, why some are rocky and others gaseous, and why one planet in particular—our Earth—provided an almost perfect haven for the emergence of life. The book takes readers to the very frontiers of modern research, engaging with the latest controversies and debates. It reveals how ongoing discoveries of far-distant extrasolar planets and planetary systems are transforming our understanding of our own solar system's astonishing history and its possible fate.

The information age owes its existence to a little-known but crucial development, the theoretical study of logic and the foundations of mathematics. This book draws on original sources and rare archival materials to trace the history of the theories of deduction and computation that laid the logical foundations for the digital revolution. The book examines the contributions of figures such as Aristotle; the nineteenth-century German polymath Hermann Grassmann; George Boole, whose Boolean logic would prove essential to programming languages and computing; Ernst Schröder, best known for his work on algebraic logic; and Giuseppe Peano, cofounder of mathematical logic. The book shows how the idea of a formal proof in mathematics emerged gradually in the second half of the nineteenth century, hand in hand with the notion of a formal process of computation. A turning point was reached by 1930, when Kurt Gödel conceived his celebrated incompleteness theorems. They were an enormous boost to the study of formal languages and computability, which were brought to perfection by the end of the 1930s with precise theories of formal languages and formal deduction and parallel theories of algorithmic computability. The book describes how the first theoretical ideas of a computer soon emerged in the work of Alan Turing in 1936 and John von Neumann some years later. Shedding new light on this crucial chapter in the history of science, this book is essential reading for students and researchers in logic, mathematics, and computer science.

When Isaac Newton's alchemical papers surfaced at a Sotheby's auction in 1936, the quantity and seeming incoherence of the manuscripts were shocking. No longer the exemplar of Enlightenment rationality, the legendary physicist suddenly became “the last of the magicians.” This book unlocks the secrets of Newton's alchemical quest, providing a radically new understanding of the uncommon genius who probed nature at its deepest levels in pursuit of empirical knowledge. The book blends in-depth analysis of newly available texts with laboratory replications of Newton's actual experiments in alchemy. It does not justify Newton's alchemical research as part of a religious search for God in the physical world, nor does it argue that Newton studied alchemy to learn about gravitational attraction. The book traces the evolution of Newton's alchemical ideas and practices over a span of more than three decades, showing how they proved fruitful in diverse scientific fields. A precise experimenter in the realm of “chymistry,” Newton put the riddles of alchemy to the test in his lab. He also used ideas drawn from the alchemical texts to great effect in his optical experimentation. In his hands, alchemy was a tool for attaining the material benefits associated with the philosopher's stone and an instrument for acquiring scientific knowledge of the most sophisticated kind. The book provides rare insights into a man who was neither Enlightenment rationalist nor irrational magus, but rather an alchemist who sought through experiment and empiricism to alter nature at its very heart.

This book explores the history of statistics from the field's origins in the nineteenth century through to the factors that produced the burst of modern statistical innovation in the early twentieth century. The book shows that statistics was not developed by mathematicians and then applied to the sciences and social sciences. Rather, the field came into being through the efforts of social scientists, who saw a need for statistical tools in their examination of society. Pioneering statistical physicists and biologists James Clerk Maxwell, Ludwig Boltzmann, and Francis Galton introduced statistical models to the sciences by pointing to analogies between their disciplines and the social sciences. A new preface looks at how the book has remained relevant since its initial publication, and considers the current place of statistics in scientific research.

Scurvy, a disease often associated with long stretches of maritime travel, generated sensations exceeding the standard of what was normal. Eyes dazzled, skin was morbidly sensitive, emotions veered between disgust and delight. This book presents an intellectual history of scurvy to tell the story of the disease that its victims couldn't because they found their illness too terrible and, in some cases, too exciting. The book traces the cultural impact of scurvy during the eighteenth-century age of geographical and scientific discovery. It explains the medical knowledge surrounding scurvy and the debates about its cause, prevention, and attempted cures. The book vividly describes the phenomenon and experience of “scorbutic nostalgia”, in which victims imagined mirages of food, water, or home, and then wept when such pleasures proved impossible to consume or reach. It argues that a culture of scurvy arose in the colony of Australia, which was prey to the disease in its early years, and identifies a literature of scurvy in the works of such figures as Herman Melville, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Francis Bacon, and Jonathan Swift. The book shows how the journeys of discovery in the eighteenth century not only ventured outward to the ends of the earth, but were also an inward voyage into the realms of sensation and passion.

This book is a pioneering work of intellectual history that transformed our understanding of the relationship between Christian theology and the development of science. The author explores the metaphysical foundations of modern science and shows how, by the 1600s, theological and scientific thinking had become almost one. Major figures like Descartes, Leibniz, Newton, and others developed an unprecedented secular theology whose debt to medieval and scholastic thought shaped the trajectory of the scientific revolution. The book ends with the author's influential analysis of the seventeenth century's “unprecedented fusion” of scientific and religious language. Featuring a new foreword, the book is a pathbreaking and classic work that remains a fundamental resource for historians and philosophers of science.

What accounts for the prestige of quantitative methods? The usual answer is that quantification is desirable in social investigation as a result of its successes in science. This book questions whether such success in the study of stars, molecules, or cells should be an attractive model for research on human societies, and examines why the natural sciences are highly quantitative in the first place. The book argues that a better understanding of the attractions of quantification in business, government, and social research brings a fresh perspective to its role in psychology, physics, and medicine. Quantitative rigor is not inherent in science but arises from political and social pressures, and objectivity derives its impetus from cultural contexts. A new preface sheds light on the current infatuation with quantitative methods, particularly at the intersection of science and bureaucracy.