Although we take it for granted today, the concept of "energy" transformed nineteenth-century physics. In The Science of Energy, Crosbie Smith shows how a North British group ...

For much of the twentieth century scientists sought to explain objects and processes by reducing them to their components—nuclei into protons and neutrons, proteins into amino ...

This finite study examines how exactitude has come to occupy such a prominent place in Western culture. Beginning with the late 18th century and continuing into the 20th, the ...

A comparison of the use of model systems and exemplary cases across fields in the natural and social sciences.

In recent years there has been a growing recognition that a mature analysis of scientific and technological activity requires an understanding of its spatial contexts. Without ...

On January 5, 1845, the Prussian cultural minister received a request by a group of six young men to form a new Physical Society in Berlin. In fields from thermodynamics ...

An innovative account of the trials and tribulations of first-generation Victorian mail steamship lines, their passengers and the public.

An important component of a biography of any great scientist is that the biographer also have deep scientific knowledge. This holds true for Silvanus P. Thompson, a scientist ...

William Thompson (1824-1907), later Lord Kelvin, was the foremost scientific figure of an age that saw the quest of classical physics concluded and marked the beginning of the ...

The life and work of a great scientist. The mathematics and figures are there (reproduced here in their full original beauty) but it is also a life to be read, by anyone, for ...