[PDF] Unstable Nature eBook

Author : Auro Michele Perego
Publisher : CRC Press
Page : 140 pages
File Size : 39,36 MB
Release : 2023-11-20
Category : Science
ISBN : 1003805922

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Unstable Nature is a popular science book offering a journey through the concept of instability in modern science with a focus on physics. Conceived for the curious reader wishing to go deeper in the fascinating and not yet popularised world of instabilities, it provides an immersion into paradoxical and unexpected phenomena - some of which hides in plain sight in our daily lives. The book is written without technical jargon, and new concepts and terminology needed for the narrative are introduced gradually based on examples taken from accessible everyday life. The chapters are connected through a path that starts from exploring instabilities at the planetary scale and then passes through a description of unstable dynamics in macroscopic settings such as in human mechanical artifacts, fluid waves, animal skin, vegetation structures, and chemical reactions, finally reaching the sub atomic scale and the biological processes of human thought. Before concluding with some general philosophical remarks, a modern landscape about the possibility of seeing instabilities not only as a detrimental effect but as resources to be harnessed for technology is explored. The book is enriched by a variety of professional anecdotes stemming from the direct research experience of the author. It features numerous connections of scientific concepts presented with other branches of the human experience and knowledge including philosophy, engineering, history of science, biology, chemistry, mathematics and computer science, poetry, and meditation. Key Features: Presents an exciting introduction to the topic, which is accessible to those without a scientific background Explores milestone discoveries in the history of the concept of instability in physics Contains anecdotes of key figures from the field, including James C. Maxwell, Alan Turing, Vladimir Zakharov, Edward Lorenz, Enrico Fermi, and Mary Tsingou

Author : John Zaller
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
Page : 388 pages
File Size : 31,49 MB
Release : 1992-08-28
Category : Political Science
ISBN : 9780521407861

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This 1992 book explains how people acquire political information from elites and the mass media and convert it into political preferences.

Author : Rachel Armstrong
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 340 pages
File Size : 12,70 MB
Release : 2019-06-11
Category : Architecture
ISBN : 1351272462

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In this ground-breaking book, the first to provide an overview of the theory and practice of experimental architecture, Rachel Armstrong explores how interdisciplinary, design-led research practices are beginning to redefine the possibilities of architecture as a profession. Drawing on experts from disciplines as varied as information technology, mathematics, poetry, graphic design, scenography, bacteriology, marine applied science and robotics, Professor Armstrong delineates original, cutting-edge architectural experiments through essays, quotes, poetry, equations and stories. Written by an acknowledged pioneer of architectural experiment, this visionary book is ideal for students and researchers wishing to engage in experimental, practice-based architectural and artistic research. It introduces radical new ideas about architecture and provides ideas and inspiration which students and researchers can apply in their own work and proposals, while practitioners can draw on it to transform their creative assumptions and develop thereby a distinctive "edge" to stand out in a highly competitive profession.

Author : Kenneth E. Boulding
Publisher : University of Texas Press
Page : 156 pages
File Size : 46,34 MB
Release : 2014-12-15
Category : Political Science
ISBN : 1477305718

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The human race has often put a high value on struggle, strife, turmoil, and excitement. Peace has been regarded as a utopian, unattainable, perhaps dull ideal or as some random element over which we have no control. However, the desperate necessities of the nuclear age have forced us to take peace seriously as an object of both personal and national policy. Stable Peace attempts to answer the question, If we had a policy for peace, what would it look like? A policy for peace aims to speed up the historically slow, painful, but persistent transition from a state of continual war and turmoil to one of continual peace. In a stable peace, the war-peace system is tipped firmly toward peace and away from the cycle of folly, illusion, and ill will that leads to war. Boulding proposes a number of modest, easily attainable, eminently reasonable policies directed toward this goal. His recommendations include the removal of national boundaries from political agendas, the encouragement of reciprocal acts of good will between potential enemies, the exploration of the theory and practice of nonviolence, the development of governmental and nongovernmental organizations to promote peace, and the development of research in the whole area of peace and conflict management. Written in straightforward, lucid prose, Stable Peace will be of importance to politicians, policy makers, economists, diplomats, all concerned citizens, and all those interested in international relations and the resolution of conflict.

Author : S. Chandrasekhar
Publisher : Courier Corporation
Page : 708 pages
File Size : 20,1 MB
Release : 2013-04-26
Category : Science
ISBN : 0486319202

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The Nobel Laureate's monumental study surveys hydrodynamic and hydromagnetic stability as a branch of experimental physics, surveying thermal instability of a layer of fluid heated from below, Benard problem, more.

Author : Linda Nash
Publisher : Univ of California Press
Page : 348 pages
File Size : 18,47 MB
Release : 2007-01-05
Category : History
ISBN : 0520939999

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Among the most far-reaching effects of the modern environmental movement was the widespread acknowledgment that human beings were inescapably part of a larger ecosystem. With this book, Linda Nash gives us a wholly original and much longer history of "ecological" ideas of the body as that history unfolded in California’s Central Valley. Taking us from nineteenth-century fears of miasmas and faith in wilderness cures to the recent era of chemical pollution and cancer clusters, Nash charts how Americans have connected their diseases to race and place as well as dirt and germs. In this account, the rise of germ theory and the pushing aside of an earlier environmental approach to illness constituted not a clear triumph of modern biomedicine but rather a brief period of modern amnesia. As Nash shows us, place-based accounts of illness re-emerged in the postwar decades, galvanizing environmental protest against smog and toxic chemicals. Carefully researched and richly conceptual, Inescapable Ecologies brings critically important insights to the histories of environment, culture, and public health, while offering a provocative commentary on the human relationship to the larger world.

Author : Bruno Latour
Publisher : John Wiley & Sons
Page : 300 pages
File Size : 43,77 MB
Release : 2017-09-05
Category : Science
ISBN : 0745684351

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The emergence of modern sciences in the seventeenth century profoundly renewed our understanding of nature. For the last three centuries new ideas of nature have been continually developed by theology, politics, economics, and science, especially the sciences of the material world. The situation is even more unstable today, now that we have entered an ecological mutation of unprecedented scale. Some call it the Anthropocene, but it is best described as a new climatic regime. And a new regime it certainly is, since the many unexpected connections between human activity and the natural world oblige every one of us to reopen the earlier notions of nature and redistribute what had been packed inside. So the question now arises: what will replace the old ways of looking at nature? This book explores a potential candidate proposed by James Lovelock when he chose the name 'Gaia' for the fragile, complex system through which living phenomena modify the Earth. The fact that he was immediately misunderstood proves simply that his readers have tried to fit this new notion into an older frame, transforming Gaia into a single organism, a kind of giant thermostat, some sort of New Age goddess, or even divine Providence. In this series of lectures on 'natural religion,' Bruno Latour argues that the complex and ambiguous figure of Gaia offers, on the contrary, an ideal way to disentangle the ethical, political, theological, and scientific aspects of the now obsolete notion of nature. He lays the groundwork for a future collaboration among scientists, theologians, activists, and artists as they, and we, begin to adjust to the new climatic regime.

Author : Ruth Heholt
Publisher : Rowman & Littlefield
Page : 258 pages
File Size : 19,81 MB
Release : 2016-11-17
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 1783488832

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Haunted Landscapes offers a fresh and innovative approach to contemporary debates about landscape and the supernatural. Landscapes are often uncanny spaces embroiled in the past; associated with absence, memory and nostalgia. Yet experiences of haunting must in some way always belong to the present: they must be felt. This collection of essays opens up new and compelling areas of debate around the concepts of haunting, affect and landscape. Landscape studies, supernatural studies, haunting and memory are all rapidly growing fields of enquiry and this book synthesises ideas from several critical approaches – spectral, affective and spatial – to provide a new route into these subjects. Examining urban and rural landscapes, haunted domestic spaces, landscapes of trauma, and borderlands, this collection of essays is designed to cross disciplines and combine seemingly disparate academic approaches under the coherent locus of landscape and haunting. Presenting a timely intervention in some of the most pressing scholarly debates of our time, Haunted Landscapes offers an attractive array of essays that cover topics from Victorian times to the present.

Author : J.M. Burgers
Publisher : Springer Science & Business Media
Page : 183 pages
File Size : 24,32 MB
Release : 2013-12-11
Category : Mathematics
ISBN : 940101745X

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Since the 'Introduction' to the main text gives an account of the way in which the problems treated in the following pages originated, this 'Preface' may be limited to an acknowledgement of the support the work has received. It started during the pe riod when I was professor of aero- and hydrodynamics at the Technical University in Delft, Netherlands, and many discussions with colleagues ha ve in:fluenced its devel opment. Oftheir names I mention here only that ofH. A. Kramers. Papers No. 1-13 ofthe list given at the end ofthe text were written during that period. Severa! ofthese were attempts to explore ideas which later had to be abandoned, but gradually a line of thought emerged which promised more definite results. This line began to come to the foreground in pa per No. 3 (1939}, while a preliminary formulation ofthe results was given in paper No. 12 (1954}. At that time, however, there still was missing a practica! method for manipulating a certain distribution function of central interest. A six months stay at the Hydrodynamics Laboratories ofthe California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, California (1950-1951}, was supported by a Contract with the Department of the Air F orce, N o. AF 33(038}-17207. A course of lectures was given during this period, which were published in typescript under the title 'On Turbulent Fluid Motion', as Report No. E-34. 1, July 1951, of the Hydrodynamics Laboratory.