Popular science with witty anecdotes that lighten the intellectual load, integtrated with scientific ideas, and philosophical and religious contexts. From Aristotle to the Big Bang, from the music of the spheres to the unimaginable ancient light of a quasar, this is the story of man's long search for an understanding of cosmic space and time. He relates Kepler struggling to define the orbit of Mars, Galileo locked under house arrest for offending the Church, William Herschel plumbing deep in space in his study of galaxies, Murray Gell-Mann plotting the particles inside protons and neutrons. Written by a professional astronomer, he aims to be accessible to the general reader. He has also written "The Red Limit" and has received a number of awards for his work and teaches science writing and astronomy at the Univesity of Californai, Verkeley.

Coming of Age in the Milky Way

I chart the considerable changes in the status and conception of the Lenz-Ising model from 1920 to 1950 in terms of three phases: In the early 1920s, Lenz and Ising introduced the model in the field of ferromagnetism. Based on an exact derivation, Ising concluded that it is incapable of displaying ferromagnetic behavior, a result he erroneously extended to three dimensions. In the next phase, Lenz and Ising’s contemporaries rejected the model as a representation of ferromagnetic materials because of its conflict with the new quantum mechanics. In the third phase, from the early 1930s to the early 1940s, the model was revived as a model of cooperative phenomena. I provide more detail on this history than the earlier accounts of Brush (1967) and Hoddeson, Schubert, Heims, and Baym (1992) and question some of their conclusions. Moreover, my account differs from these in its focus on the development of the model in its capacity as a model. It examines three aspects of this development: (1) the attitudes on the degree of physical realism of the Lenz-Ising model in its representation of physical phenomena; (2) the various reasons for studying and using it; and (3) the effect of the change in its theoretical basis during the transition from the old to the new quantum mechanics. A major theme of my study is that even though the Lenz-Ising model is not fully realistic, it is more useful than more realistic models because of its mathematical tractability. I argue that this point of view, important for the modern conception of the model, is novel and that its emergence, while perhaps not a consequence of its study, is coincident with the third phase of its development.

History of the Lenz-Ising Model 1920–1950: From Ferromagnetic to Cooperative Phenomena

L'experience physique tel que l'alpinisme est au XIX e siecle une methode pedagogique qui a permis a Forbes (J.D.) et Tyndall (J.) de comprendre la theorie des caracteristiques physiques de la terre, en particulier le mouvement des glaciers

The Heroic Science of Glacier Motion

On Human Nature

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Modernity, Capitalism, and War: Toward a Sociology of War in the Nineteenth Century,

Putting physics into the historical context of the Industrial Revolution and the European nation-state, Purrington traces the main figures, including Faraday, Maxwell, Kelvin, and Helmholtz, as well as their interactions, experiments, discoveries, and debates. The success of nineteenth-century physics laid the foundation for quantum theory and relativity in the twentieth. Robert D. Purrington is a professor of physics at Tulane University and coauthor of Frame of the Universe.

Physics in the nineteenth century

Through the lens of Chinese food, the authors address recent theories in social science concerning cultural identity, ethnicity, boundary formation, consumerism and globalization, and the invention of local cuisine in the context of rapid culture change in East and Southeast Asia.

Some Truer Method: Reflections on the Heritage of Newton

The First Professional Scientist

Acknowledgments.- Preface.- Restoring Robert Hooke.- Robert Hooke: Indefaticable Genius: Hooke and London.- Promoting Physico-Mathematical-Experimental Learning: Founding the Royal Society of London.- Society of the Muses: The First Decade.- Crisis and Consolidation: 1672-1687.- The Society after the Principia: 1688-1703.- Scientific Virtuoso: Hooke 1655-1687.- And All Was Light: Hooke and Newton on Light and Color.- The Nature of Things Themselves: Robert Hooke, Natural Philosopher.- The System of the World: Hooke and Universal Gravitation, the Inverse-Square Law, and Planetary Orbits.- The Omnipotence of the Creator: Robert Hooke, Astronomer.- The Last Remain: Hooke after the Principia, 1687-1703.-Epilogue.- Bibliography.- Index

https://jps.library.utoronto.ca/index.php/aestimatio/article/download/25937/19076

Robert D. Purrington

Papers

Physics in the nineteenth century

Some Truer Method: Reflections on the Heritage of Newton

The First Professional Scientist

The First Professional Scientist: Robert Hooke and the Royal Society of London

Frame of the Universe: A History of Physical Cosmology