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"Cosmology History 20th century."
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The cosmic century : a history of astrophysics and cosmology
The 20th century saw the growth of astrophysics and cosmology from subjects which scarely existed to two of the most exciting areas of contemporary scientific inquiry. Malcolm Longair reviews the historical developments in key areas of both fields with an emphasis on theoretical concepts.
Book
Entropic Creation
Entropic Creation is the first book to consider the cultural and religious responses to the second law of thermodynamics, and the theory proposed by certain Christian scholars during the period 1860 to 1920 that the entropic creation argument is proof of a divine creation of the world.
eBook
The many worlds of Hugh Everett III : multiple universes, mutual assured destruction, and the meltdown of a nuclear family
Hugh Everett III's \"Many Worlds\" theory, of infinite multiple universes, is now considered a hugely important breakthrough in the history of physics.This book tells the story of the physics establishment's rejection of his theory, his subsequent Pentagon career in nuclear strategy, and his difficult personal life and eventual death from alcoholism.
eBook
The Unsettled Number: Hubble’s Tension
One of main sources of uncertainty in modern cosmology is the present rate of the universe’s expansion, H0, called the Hubble constant. Once again, different observational techniques bring about different results, causing new “Hubble tension”. In the present work, we review the historical roots of the Hubble constant from the beginning of the twentieth century, when modern cosmology originated, to the present. We develop the arguments that gave rise to the importance of measuring the expansion of the Universe and its discovery, and we describe the different pioneering works attempting to measure it. There has been a long dispute on this matter, even in the present epoch, which is marked by high-tech instrumentation and, therefore, in smaller uncertainties in the relevant parameters. It is, again, currently necessary to conduct a careful and critical revision of the different methods before one invokes new physics to solve the so-called Hubble tension.
Journal Article
The ‘enigma’ of Richard Schultes, Amazonian hallucinogenic plants, and the limits of ethnobotany
This story is about the twentieth-century ethnobotanist, Richard Evans Schultes (1915–2001), and his research on hallucinogenic plants. Ethnobotany can contribute directly to science and technology studies in that the discipline makes cultural ways of knowing its scientific subject. Ethnobotanists must learn about plants through people, and are not able to conceal their interactions with indigenous informants and other ethnobotanists. I focus on an ‘enigma’ that Schultes presented, concerning the peculiar ability of indigenous Amazonians to distinguish between local varieties of vine that he was unable to tell apart, notably those used to prepare the hallucinogenic beverage ayahuasca. The enigma describes a complicated and irresolvable question thrown up at the uneasy intersection between different ways of knowing about the world, and shows how modern scientific travellers might navigate – or fail to navigate – the uncertain passage between them. Together with Schultes’s accounts of his own non-ordinary states of consciousness elicited by ayahuasca, and his writings on the Victorian botanist Richard Spruce, I chart an epistemological gulf between Schultes’s modern scientific cosmology and that of his Amazonian informants. In describing his inability to learn about the ayahuasca varieties from Amazonians, Schultes’s enigma traces the very limits of the ethnobotanical discipline and reveals the fragility of the processes by which scientific naturalists might impose categories such as ‘nature’ and ‘culture’.
Journal Article
Legal Pluralism's Other: Mythologizing Modern Law
This article interrogates the concept of legal pluralism, as it currently tends to function within contemporary legal and historical scholarship. It argues that the concept of legal pluralism cannot ‘liberate’ positivist analytical legal theory from monist (municipal, state-centric, etc.) straightjackets, but rather itself presumes the primacy of centralized state-issued law—at the same time as masking that primacy within a pluralist discourse. The concept of legal pluralism should be properly understood—and analyzed—as part of the mythology of modern law, not as an alternative to it. The first two sections develop this argument via a critical tour of legal-pluralist historiography, focusing on 1986 to the present day. The final section then moves on to explore what is at stake for the pre-modern historian when they apply (modern) concept(s) of legal pluralism to try to explain the multiplicity of legal orders that they invariably encounter in their own source material.
Journal Article
The Reinvention of General Relativity: A Historiographical Framework for Assessing One Hundred Years of Curved Space-time
The history of the theory of general relativity presents unique features. After its discovery, the theory was immediately confirmed and rapidly changed established notions of space and time. The further implications of general relativity, however, remained largely unexplored until the mid 1950s, when it came into focus as a physical theory and gradually returned to the mainstream of physics. This essay presents a historiographical framework for assessing the history of general relativity by taking into account in an integrated narrative intellectual developments, epistemological problems, and technological advances; the characteristics of post–World War II and Cold War science; and newly emerging institutional settings. It argues that such a framework can help us understand this renaissance of general relativity as a result of two main factors: the recognition of the untapped potential of general relativity and an explicit effort at community building, which allowed this formerly disparate and dispersed field to benefit from the postwar changes in the scientific landscape.
Journal Article
Celestial Hellscapes
The common thread of astronomy is fantastically important for understanding the Strugatskiis' works--their most important works are experiments in cosmology. This book explores how the Strugatskiis cosmological explorations are among the most fundamental elements of their art. It also examines how these explorations connect to their predecessors in the Russian literary tradition.
eBook
Atheism for clever people
Personally, I wouldn't even hazard a guess as to how you would begin the task of emulating the unique physicality of Hawking, who must be one of the most recognisable people on the planet, but Redmayne--thanks in no small part to an uncanny resemblence between the actor and his subject--manages to capture perfectly Hawking's presence and even manages the physiognomic feat of conveying so much intimated meaning without the use of facial features, but just by a twitch of the eye partially hidden behind his voice synthesiser.
Journal Article
Universes without Us
During the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a wide variety of American writers proposed the existence of energies connecting human beings to cosmic processes. From varying points of view-scientific, philosophical, religious, and literary-they suggested that such energies would eventually result in the perfection of individual and collective bodies, assuming that assimilation into larger networks of being meant the expansion of humanity's powers and potentialities-a belief that continues to inform much posthumanist theory today.
Universes without Usexplores a lesser-known countertradition in American literature. As Matthew A. Taylor's incisive readings reveal, the heterodox cosmologies of Edgar Allan Poe, Henry Adams, Charles Chesnutt, and Zora Neale Hurston reject the anthropocentric fantasy that sees the universe as a kind of reservoir of self-realization. For these authors, the world can be made neither \"other\" nor \"mirror.\" Instead, humans are enmeshed with \"alien\" processes that are both constitutive and destructive of \"us.\" By envisioning universes no longer our own, these cosmologies picture a form of interconnectedness that denies any human ability to master it.
Universes without Usdemonstrates how the questions, possibilities, and dangers raised by the posthuman appeared nearly two centuries ago. Taylor finds in these works an untimely engagement with posthumanism, particularly in their imagining of universes in which humans are only one category of heterogeneous thing in a vast array of species, objects, and forces. He shows how posthumanist theory can illuminate American literary texts and how those texts might, in turn, prompt a reassessment of posthumanist theory. By understanding the posthuman as a materialist cosmology rather than a technological innovation, Taylor extends the range of thinkers who can be included in contemporary conversations about the posthuman.
eBook