In recent years governments and scientific establishments have been encouraging the development of professional and popular science communication. This book critically examines the origin of this drive to improve communication, and discusses why simply improving scientists' communication skills and understanding of their audiences may not be enough. Written in an engaging style, and avoiding specialist jargon, this book provides an insight into science's place in society by looking at science communication in three contexts...
The Experimental and Historical Foundations of Electricity deals with the most fundamental aspects of physics. The book describes the main experiments and discoveries in the history of electricity. It begins with the amber effect, which is analogous to the usual experiment of attracting small pieces of paper with a piece of plastic rubbed in hair. The book explains how to build several instruments: versorium, electric pendulum, electroscope and charge collectors. Electric attraction and repulsion, positive and negative charges, and the ACR mechanism (attraction, communication of electricity, and repulsion) are discussed.
A One-Stop Source of Known Results, a Bibliography of Papers on the Subject, and Novel Research Directions Focusing on a very active area of research in the last decade, Combinatorics of Compositions and Words provides an introduction to the methods used in the combinatorics of pattern avoidance and pattern enumeration in compositions and words. It also presents various tools and approaches that are applicable to other areas of enumerative combinatorics.
The political regime of global capitalism reduces the world to an endless network of numbers within numbers, but how many of us really understand what numbers are? Without such an understanding, how can we challenge the regime of number? In Number and Numbers Alain Badiou offers an philosophically penetrating account with a powerful political subtext of the attempts that have been made over the last century to define the special status of number.
