Explore the vast range of titles available.

\"Already in 1786, Sir William Jones, founder of the Asiatick Society in Calcutta, wrote \"What their astronomical and mathematical writings contain, will not, I trust, remain long a secret: they are easily procured, and their importance cannot be doubted\". Nevertheless, though India is nowadays a part of our daily media environment, its science, as ancient as Greek science, is still badly known and insufficiently included in history of science manuals. This book aims at helping to fill this gap by letting some of the best specialists in Indian astronomy and mathematics express themselves. They recount the evolution of these sciences, from the 'Aryabhatiya' (6th century) to the works of the Keralese astronomers-mathematicians (13-16th centuries), via treatises on prosody (14th century) and on astrolabe making produced since the same period. These treatises are described in association with the oldest Sanskrit astrolabe, preserved in Belgium.\"--P. [4] of cover.

01 02 Navigational Enterprises in Europe and its Empires, 1730–1850 brings together the work of international authors to explore European experiences in the development of new navigational techniques and instruments in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. This is the period in which the 'longitude problem' has been presented as being solved in an unproblematic way. Challenging this narrative, the book looks beyond just the British story to examine the role of governments, institutions, men of science, practitioners and navigators across Europe, and the use of the new and old techniques and instruments in practice. As the different chapters show, the methods available, including long-established navigational techniques such as dead reckoning and the newer astronomical and timekeeping methods of longitude determination, were complementary rather than exclusive. When and how they were used depended on local, national and other circumstances, although their development must be seen as the result of international and transnational exchanges. 04 02 1. Introduction; Rebekah Higgitt and Richard Dunn 2. A Southern Meridian: Astronomical Undertakings in the Eighteenth-Century Spanish Empire; Juan Pimentel 3. The Longitude Committee and the Practice of Navigation in the Netherlands, c.1750–1850; Karel Davids 4. From Lacaille to Lalande: French Work on Lunar Distances, Nautical Ephemerides and Lunar Tables, 1742–85; Guy Boistel 5. The Bureau des Longitudes: An Institutional Study; Martina Schiavon 6. Patriotic and Cosmopolitan Patchworks: Following a Swedish Astronomer into London's Communities of Maritime Longitude, 1759–60; Jacob Orrje 7. 'Perfectly Correct': Russian Navigators and the Royal Navy; Simon Werrett 8. A Different Kind of Longitude: The Metrology and Conventions of Location by Geodesy; Michael Kershaw 9. Testing Longitude Methods in Mid-Eighteenth Century France; Danielle M. E. Fauque 10. Navigating the Pacific from Bougainville to Dumont d'Urville: French Approaches to Determining Longitude, 1766–1840; John Gascoigne 11. Navigation and Mathematics: A Match Made in the Heavens?; Jane Wess 12 . Longitude Networks on Land and Sea: The East India Company and Longitude Measurement 'in the Wild', 1770–1840; David Philip Miller 02 02 This book explores the development of navigation in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. It examines the role of men of science, seamen and practitioners across Europe, and the realities of navigational practice, showing that old and new methods were complementary not exclusive, their use dependent on many competing factors. 08 02 \"Higgitt, Dunn and their learned authors present a fascinating alternative history of longitude, latitude and navigation ... Historians of science and empire, maritime and physical histories will want it on shelves as soon as possible.\" - Alison Bashford, Jesus College, University of Cambridge, UK 13 02 Richard Dunn is Senior Curator of the History of Science at the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich, UK, where he has worked since 2004. Rebekah Higgitt is Lecturer in History of Science at the University of Kent, UK, and formerly Curator of History of Science at the National Maritime Museum, Greenwich. Dunn and Higgitt are co-authors of Finding Longitude: How Clocks and Stars Helped Solve the Longitude Problem (2014).

No detailed description available for \"Hemispheres and Stratospheres\".

The Indo-European debate has been going on for a century and a half. Initially confined to linguistics, race-based anthropology and comparative mythology, it soon extended to archaeology, especially with the discovery of the Harappan civilization, and peripheral disciplines such as agriculture, archaeometallurgy or archaeoastronomy. The latest entrant in the field, archaeogenetics, is currently all but claiming that it has finally laid to rest the whole issue of a hypothetical migration of Indo-Aryan speakers to the Indian subcontinent in the second millennium BCE. This paper questions the finality of this claim by pointing to inherent limitations, methodological issues and occasional biases in current studies as well as in the interpretation of archaeological evidence.

A comprehensive history of Astronomy should show in reasonable chronological order, the contributions from wherever they arise in the world, once they are reliably documented. However, the authors note that consistently, the extremely rich contributions from Ancient Indian scholars like Aryabatha and Bhramagupta are omitted in Eurocentric education and syllabi. It is speculated whether religious underpinnings could have been responsible for its suppression in the past. An appeal is made to represent the history of Astronomy in Eurocentric versions, to be inclusive of Indian Astronomy as accurately and completely as possible in science education.

The inter-annual variations in wave spectrum are examined based on the wave data measured at 9 m water depth off the central west coast of India from 2009 to 2012 using a wave rider buoy. The temporal variation of the spectral energy density over a calendar year indicates similar variation in all the four years studied. The inter-annual variations in wave spectrum are observed in all months with larger variations during January to February, May and October to November due to the changes in wind-sea. The seasonal average wave spectrum during the monsoon (June-September) is single-peaked and the swell component is high in 2011 compared to other years. The annual averaged wave spectrum had higher peak energy during 2011 due to the higher spectral energy present during the monsoon period. During the non-monsoon period, two peaks are predominantly observed in the wave spectra; with the average peak at 0.07 Hz corresponding to the swells from the Indian Ocean and another at 0.17 Hz due to the local wind field.

This article argues that the study of astronomical observing instruments, their transportation around the globe and the personal and professional networks created by such exchanges are useful conceptual tools in exploring the role of science in the nineteenth-century British Empire. The shipping of scientific instruments highlights the physical and material connections that bound the empire together. Large, heavy and fragile objects, such as transit circles, were difficult to transport and repair. As such, the logistical difficulties associated with their movement illustrate the limitations of colonial scientific enterprises and their reliance on European centres. The discussion also examines the impact of the circulation of such objects on observatories and astronomers working in southern Africa, India and St Helena by tracing the connections between these places and British scientific institutions, London-based instrument-makers, and staff at the Royal Observatory, Greenwich. It explores the ways in which astronomy generally, and the use of observing instruments in particular, relate to broader themes about the applications of science, the development of colonial identities, and the consolidation of empire in the first half of the nineteenth century. In considering these issues, the article illustrates the symbiotic relationship between science and empire in the period, demonstrating the overlap between political and strategic considerations and purely scientific endeavours. Almost paradoxically, as they trained their sights and their telescopes on the heavens, astronomers and observers helped to draw diverse regions of the earth beneath closer together. By tracing the movement of instruments and the arcs of patronage, cooperation and power that these trajectories inscribe, the role of science and scientific objects in forging global links and influencing the dynamics of the nineteenth-century British Empire is brought into greater focus.

In critiquing methodologies of the “global” as a spatial unit of analysis or a receptacle for influence across the planet, this essay positions India so as to assess the role and forms of science in the modern world. By taking the mid-nineteenth century as a moment of departure, it asks why, under what conditions, and to what effects Indians accepted science, but not biomedicine, in the high noon of colonialism. Existing imperial histories of science that are primarily fixated on the eighteenth century cast science as a site of exchange and dialogue, thus replicating the narrative of European expansion overseas. Instead, the power of science is here understood in the context of the politics of religion and rationality. In a synoptic overview, the essay assesses the archaeology of science and the blurred practices between religion and science, described here as “insurgent.” It argues that science in India was a form of enchantment, while religion had become a form of disenchanted but rational knowledge. Unlike in Europe, and contrary to orientalist positions, science in India neither declared the death of God nor became “spiritualized” via religion. Instead, science inflected religion; and religion, in turn, facilitated a rational mediation between science and man. This specific relationship accounts for the “soft landing” of science in India and its usurpation in the service of an unapologetic national modernity.