Product Description
In this fresh account of the scientific ferment following the Renaissance, Dr. Cohen tells, through the lives of Copericus, Galileo, Kepler, and Newton the story of the search for a new physics- a physics to describe the dynamics of a moving universe. In conflict with Aristotelian physics Copernicus's concept of a earthin motion necessitated bold new explanations of natural phenomena, from the mechanics of rolling balls to the motions of stars and planets. This serch culminated in Newton's master stroke, the formulation of the law of universal graviation and his related laws, which are the foundation of mocern science and technology and which represent "the creative accomplishment of the human spirit at its pinanacle. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (3)

Nice Introduction
This is a very nice introduction to the great 17th century revolution in science.Singer concentrates on a single major issue; the emergence of modern dynamics and its ability to provide a universal explanation of motion on Earth and of the Solar system.Singer provides a nice precis of Aristotlean physics, the development of the Copernican system, and the contributions of Galileo and Kepler.He concludes with a chapter on Newton's triumphant development of modern physics.This is not a comprehensive history; there is little here about figures like Huygens or Descartes, but rather a thematic pursuit of a crucial issue.Presented with a minimum of math, this is an excellent exposition of how theory and experiment interacted to produce the basis of modern physics.

Excellent introduction
This book is a well-written introduction to the lives and discoveries of the three giants at the base of modern science.It doesn't ascribe to the nonsense that most modern philosophers of science spout as defining science as simply a mathematical description of appearances.The book avoids these philosophic aberrations and instead presents the discoveries of Newton, Kepler, and Galileo in a way that properly emphasizes the enormity of their genius, the scope of their inductions and the central importance of their contributions to the scientific method.

Enjoyable little book
I found this to be a very enjoyable book written in a kind of history book style. There is enough information included to explain the discoveries of Newton and others without getting too technical. I read this book for a college paper on Newton's life. ... Read more

Product Description
This Introduction serves a dual purpose: it is a guide to the Principia and a biography of the work. It provides an analytic history of how Newton came to write the book, the printing of the several editions, the critical receptions given to each edition, and—above all—how Newton continually corrected, revised, and enlarged the text over four decades. ... Read more

Product Description
Written by one of the world's leading political geographers, this textbook examines the dramatic changes wrought by ideological and economic forces unleashed by the end of the Cold War. Saul Cohen considers these forces in the context of their human and physical settings and explores their geographical influence on foreign policy and international relations. ... Read more

Product Description
Transformation and Tradition in the Sciences presents a sampling of work in the history of science by colleagues and former students and associates of I. Bernard Cohen, one of the most influential figures in the rise of the history of science as a scholarly discipline. The volume is divided into four parts: the history and philosophy of the exact sciences and mathematics; the eighteenth-century tradition; science in America; and scientific ideas in their cultural context. These major themes, each of which has been a subject of study by Professor Cohen, will interest a range of historians interested in the development of science and the history of ideas. ... Read more

Product Description
From the pyramids to mortality tables, Galileo to Florence Nightingale, a vibrant history of numbers and the birth of statistics.The great historian of science I. B. Cohen explores how numbers have come to assume a leading role in science, in the operations and structure of government, in marketing, and in many other aspects of daily life. Consulting and collecting numbers has been a feature of human affairs since antiquity—taxes, head counts for military service—but not until the Scientific Revolution in the twelfth century did social numbers such as births, deaths, and marriages begin to be analyzed. Cohen shines a new light on familiar figures such as Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, and Charles Dickens; and he reveals Florence Nightingale to be a passionate statistician. Cohen has left us with an engaging and accessible history of numbers, an appreciation of the essential nature of statistics. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (4)

Compelling
A compelling review of how counting has created history and changed our lives for the better."

A book about the people who were all about the numbers
This is a book about statistics and economics, without the statistics and economics. Cohen explains not just what a census is, or why someone started them, but how people came to realize that census data could be useful in the first place. That's the unique feature of this book - much like the question of who was the first guy to look at a lobster and wonder, is this thing edible?, we find out who was the first guy to look at a register of town deaths and think, "you know, we could tell something about the population of this city from this data!" The book is not about statistics; it's the stories of the people who first came to realize that numbers could be used to improve society rather than just to collect taxes from the populace.

I really enjoyed the anecdotes about the various numerical interests of famous people. For example, Thomas Jefferson's obsessive recording of numbers. Did you know that Jefferson calculated that to keep the populace and the politics of a country in good shape, there should be a minor revolution every 19 years?

Even more did I enjoy reading about Benjamin Franklin's fascination with magic squares. When Franklin was serving as clerk in the Pennsylvania Legislature, he frequently got bored to pieces and solved and designed magic squares. I liked this because when I'm at boring meetings, I hide pages torn from logic puzzle magazines in my notepad, and spend time doing them, and it looks as though I'm diligently taking notes; it is nice to learn that I am following in the footsteps of a master.

Later chapters come back to the part that population counts and demographics played in the founding of the USA, such as examples that a nineteenth century sociologist found of deliberate misuse of population numbers by the Americans in an effort to deceive the British.

As others have noted, the final chapter is about Florence Nightingale. Cohen emphasizes Nightingale's reform of the previously almost-nonexistent record-keeping in hopitals in the Crimea, and how she used this data to show that far more soldiers died of disease than of the wounds that initially brought them to hospitals. The illustration showing Nightingale's diagrams of the causes of death in the British army is neat - the diagrams are essentially pie charts, and when I was teaching quantitative software applications to college undergrads, I would have been quite pleased if they had produced charts this cogent. Nightingale considered this graphic representation of numbers, still a novelty at the time, so important that she had copies of the diagrams framed and sent to government officials, in order to keep the issues before their eyes.

If one expects a book about the development of statistics, then this book would be a disappointment; if one wants the stories of the people who first thought to put the early science of statistics to use for the improvement of society as a whole, then this is exactly what you are looking for. Although it's a bit dry for a popular book, and a bit scattered for an academic book, it is interesting enough to hold the attention of readers who want to know more about how we got the sciences of demographics and sociology, or anyone who ever wondered how insurance companies came to have all those actuarial tables. Among others who might enjoy the book would be young women in high school or college who are considering entering the social sciences; they will find the inclusion of Nightingale inspiring.

Sometimes Fascinating, Often Frustrating, Poorly Organized
This posthumously published book was finished only days before his death by I. Bernard Cohen, the founder of the Harvard Department of the History of Science. One has the sense that had he had more time to work on it it might have been better organized and more tightly focused. Although there are many fascinating facts and anecdotes in this short outline of the effects of numbers on modern life and the development of their use over the centuries, there are many divagations that don't add much to the story. When he takes time to correct the French in someone's book title, one wonders why he wastes space on that when he doesn't make it clear why he was citing the book in the first place. Still we meet such well-known characters as Kepler and Galileo, Jefferson and Franklin, and lesser known but fascinating thinkers like André Michel Guerry and Adolphe Quetelet who advanced the science of statistics and applied it to such sociological concerns as crime and punishment. We meet statistical Luddites like Dickens, who thought the collection of demographic data would be used against the average man. We finish with a weak chapter about Florence Nightingale's use of statistics in the medical realm. We do not venture on into the twentieth century.

This is a variably interesting but ultimately not very useful essay, I'm afraid. It is notable for its quirkily amusinganecdotes, but rather falls down when it attempts to convey the important uses to which numbers are put in modern life.

Scott Morrison

Interesting History on Use of Numbers
This short book discusses the history of the use of numbers to describe the world. The author starts off with a discussion on how numbers began to be used to describe physical items. Eventually, the discussion focuses mainly on the evolution of the use of numbers in the social sciences - hence, the birth of statistics. The book contains some fascinating information on how social statistics evolved, with an entire chapter devoted to Florence Nightingale. It should be emphasized that the focus is mainly on how numbers came to be used and not necessarily on the actual results obtained; thus, if the reader is expecting to see a discussion of the results, he or she may be disappointed at times. But this is a minor shortcoming. The book is well-written and clear. The author (deceased prior to the book's publication) was a well-seasoned expert on the history of science with a good number of publications to his credit. ... Read more

Product Description
Clinically focused and practical, this diagnostic reference is ideal for anyone who treats children with skin disorders. Over 800 top-quality full-color illustrations, balanced by clear and succinct text, deliver the right amount of clinical detail to help readers identify a wide range of diseases. Plus, summary tables and differential diagnosis algorithms help simplify diagnosis.* Contains differential diagnosis algorithms and summary tables that aid in diagnosis. * Offers a comprehensive bibliography at the end of each chapter for further study. * Uses an easily accessible format to locate key information. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Pediatric Dermatology is outstanding
I think this is wonderful book. It helps to more easily let you understand with big pictures to show what everything is.Also it has wonderful descriptions and design.It is also very updated. ... Read more

Product Description
This volume presents Professor Cohen's original interpretation of the revolution that marked the beginnings of modern science and set Newtonian science as the model for the highest level of achievement in other branches of science. It shows that Newton developed a special kind of relation between abstract mathematical constructs and the physical systems that we observe in the world around us by means of experiment and critical observation. The heart of the radical Newtonian style is the construction on the mind of a mathematical system that has some features in common with the physical world; this system s then modified when the deductions and conclusions drawn from it are tested against the physical universe. Using this system Newton was able to make his revolutionary innovations in celestial mechanics and, ultimately, create a new physics of central forces and the law of universal gravitation. Building on his analysis of Newton's methodology, Professor Cohen explores the fine structure of revolutionary change and scientific creativity in general. This is done by developing the concept of scientific change as a series of transformations of ecxisting ideas. It is shown that such transformation is characteristic of many aspects of the sciences and that the concept of scientific change by transformation suggests a new way of examining the very nature of scientific creativity. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Good survey text with some pretensions
This book is useful as a survey text. But it tries to be more by introducing two grandiose historiographical schemes: "the Newtonian style" and the notion of "transformation of ideas".

The Newtonian style is an attempt at characterising the relation between mathematics and physics in Newton (in effect: do idealised mathematics first and worry about physical reality and causes second). I would encourage any potential readers to instead study Newton's mathematical and physical works themselves, keeping in mind that "Newton was always first and foremost a mathematician" (p. 101), after which Cohen's longwinded analysis will be seen to be void of any novelty.

As for the "transformation of ideas", this framework seems to me to be trivially true at best. Of course Newton did not concoct the Principia out of thin air but rather relied on the work of others, whose ideas he "transformed" in brilliant ways. But to elevate the study of the transformation of ideas to a historiographical dictum, as Cohen pretty much suggests, has some clear dangers. For one thing, the way scientists absorb and transform contemporary ideas seem to be, as a rule, fortuitous and hard to rationalise. Newton is typical in this respect: he "read very little of Kepler's writings" (p. 189) and "was but imperfectly acquainted with Galileo's writings" (p. 195), blatantly misrepresenting the latter's view in the Principia, for example. Another danger is to make too much of terminology; to try to trace antecedents of Newton's terms, for example, which Cohen is very fond of. Given Newton's (and other's) erratic reading habits, there is good reason to think that many of the connections that are uncovered are accidental.

Now I will take issue with a specific instance where Cohen has been misled by his transformational goggles. Cohen claims that Newton conceived of solar gravity first, and interplanetary gravity only later as a result of the third law, action=reaction. This he fits into a transformational mould: "The transformation that yielded the Newtonian mutual force of sun and planets from the Hookean concept of a solar centripetal force acting on a planet---a transformation produced by the application of the general Newtonian law of action and reaction (itself a generalisation by transformation of a rule for impact)---was a step of the greatest significance in the history of science." (p. 261).

I say: this step does not exist. Indeed, Cohen admits openly that "we have no direct evidence to support this point of view" (p. 267). His indirect evidence rests on the observation that Kepler's law are strictly speaking false in Newtonian dynamics (while of course true if gravity is confined to the sun). This pedantic observation is nothing but "minutiae", as Newton himself said (p. 265). Nevertheless, some fools (e.g. Popper and his clan) have insisted on attaching the utmost importance to this trivial minutiae, and have drawn the most absurd consequences from this heedlessness of theirs. Now Cohen joins this growing cluster of fools.

The historical evidence is as follows. In the De motu of 1684, Newton stated the law of ellipses without qualification. Later he revised it to discuss perturbation effects as well, and naturally he then introduced this discussion by noting that the law of ellipses is of course false in general. According to Cohen, Newton actually thought that the law of ellipses was strictly true when he wrote the 1684 version and some time later he supposedly had the great epiphany of universal gravitation and wrote the second version. In my opinion this account is extremely implausible on scientific grounds but we don't have to go into that since Cohen's textual evidence can be trivially refuted on the basis of the facts he himself supplies. Cohen's interpretation runs in to trouble at once, since Newton did not alter the statement of the law of ellipses in the revised version even though he was obviously aware by then that is was strictly false. Cohen has to explain this away:

"Newton composed the new [text] without carefully rereading the whole text of De motu. He would thus not have been aware that the new paragraph contradicted the prior scholium ... which accordingly would have required major revision." (p. 267).

Now Cohen has painted himself into a corner: his interpretation hinges on the assumption that Newton would not state the law of ellipses unequivocally if it was strictly false, not even as a convenient shorthand when it obvious from the proof that it only applies to one-body systems. But Newton used such shorthand language all the time, as have everyone else ever since. Cohen is forced to be blind to this fact to save his interpretation, even when he himself quotes a perfect example of such a mode of expression in the Principia: "The common center of gravity of the earth and moon traverses an ellipse about the sun, one in which the sun is located at a focus" (p. 274). This is a crystal clear statement of a strictly false theorem right in the Principia, occurring not at the idealised mathematical stage but well into book three, after the perturbation effects of Jupiter etc. have been introduced. Thus no evidence whatsoever remains to support Cohen's reconstruction of the genesis of universal gravitation. ... Read more

Product Description
Il y a encore quelques mois, Harry Ricks était professeur dans une université américaine et menait une vie tranquille avec sa femme et sa fille. Aujourd'hui, Harry survit tout juste dans une chambre de bonne crasseuse à Paris, au fin fond du Xe arrondissement, et n'a plus aucun contact avec sa famille. Alors qu'il croit toucher le fond, la passion fait irruption dans sa vie : elle s'appelle Margit, elle est hongroise et sensuelle. Et très énigmatique : Harry ne devra pas lui poser de questions sur son travail, son passé, sa vie, et ne pourra la voir que deux fois par semaine, à dix-sept heures, dans son appartement du Ve. Comme envoûté, Harry accepte. Mais bientôt se produisent autour de lui d'étranges coïncidences...Traduit de l'américain par Bernard Cohen ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

The classic
This book was The classic written in an age where humanity seemed ready for the cheapest, most environmentally-safe, practical and useful proven energy source we have discovered to date: nuclear power.

Now that we are beginning to realize that we should have been building as many reactors as possible for the last few decades and are alarmingly behind, this should be the the bible to build that foundation-written in a style all can profit from from layperson to advanced scientist.

The fact that this book is the best description of advanced concepts in physics to a layperson ever written doesn't hurt. Few can read this book and still hold on to their hysterical phobia about moving on to the next stage in human advancement. ... Read more

Product Description
This book provides a detailed examination of what is required for a body of knowledge to be considered scientific. Cohen treats general topics like value bias, the nature of observation, and the limitations of the scientific study, but he also discusses specific topics like the elements of a theory and the necessity of restricting the scope of knowledge claims. The second edition contains substantial new material including new chapters dealing with the problems of quantitative measurement, research design, the limits of empirical research, and the methodology of cumulative research programs. ... Read more

Product Description
Written by one of the world's leading political geographers, this fully revised and updated textbook examines the dramatic changes wrought by ideological and economic forces unleashed by the end of the Cold War. Saul Cohen considers these forces in the context of their human and physical settings and explores their geographical influence on foreign policy and international relations. ... Read more

Product Description
General readers, students of American history, and professional historians alike will profit from reading this engaging presentation of an aspect of American history conspicuously absent from the usual textbooks and popular presentations of the political thought of this crucial period.Thomas Jefferson was the only president who could read and understand Newton's Principia. Benjamin Franklin is credited with establishing the science of electricity. John Adams had the finest education in science that the new country could provide, including "Pnewmaticks, Hydrostaticks, Mechanicks, Staticks, Opticks." James Madison, chief architect of the Constitution, peppered his Federalist Papers with reference to physics, chemistry, and the life sciences.

For these men science was an integral part of life--including political life. This is the story of their scientific education and of how they employed that knowledge in shaping the political issues of the day, incorporating scientific reasoning into the Constitution.
... Read more