science Archives

Imperial Science, the Organic Movement and the Path to Shangri-La, 1900-1969

Imperial Science, the Organic Movement and the Path to Shangri-La, 1900-1969 investigates scientific studies undertaken in British India by Robert McCarrison and Albert Howard in the 1920s, and how this research was later adapted in Britain and the USA. It examines how imperial agendas and colonial stereotyping shaped McCarrison’s dietary laboratory experiments and Howard’s development of the Indore Composting Process. Ashok Malhotra reveals how Indian scientists and Indian Princes contributed to the research culture in the institutes that were founded by these two British scientists, and in so doing, he draws attention to figures whose contributions have previously been overlooked by scholars. Malhotra demonstrates how McCarrison’s and Howard’s research was interpreted by British and US-based organic farming advocates to advocate for agricultural methods which returned organic matter to the soil and rejected chemical fertilisers.

It discusses how organic advocates on both sides of the Atlantic deployed the Hunzas, a community in British India (later Pakistan), as an example of a ‘tribe’ whose vigour could be ascribed to their farming techniques and diets. The narrative concludes by demonstrating how US travel writers in the 1950s and 1960s represented Hunza as a Shangri-La – a paradise whose inhabitants lived prolonged lives in blissful contentment.

The Poetry of John Tyndall

John Tyndall (1822–1893) is best known as a leading natural philosopher and trenchant public intellectual of the Victorian age. He discovered the physical basis of the greenhouse effect, explained why the sky is blue, and spoke and wrote controversially on the relationship between science and religion. Few people were aware that he also wrote poetry. The Poetry of John Tyndall contains his 76 extant poems, the majority of which have not been transcribed or published before, and are succinctly annotated in a style similar to that used for the letters published in The Correspondence of John Tyndall.

The poems are complemented by an extended introduction, which was written by the three editors together as a multidisciplinary analysis. The essay aims to facilitate readings by a range of people interested in the history of Victorian science and of Victorian science and literature. It explores what the poems can tell us about Tyndall’s self-fashioning, his values and beliefs, and the role of poetry for him and his circle. More broadly, the essay addresses the relationship between the scientific and poetic imaginations, and wider questions of the nature and purpose of poetry in relation to science and religion in the nineteenth century.

Women in the History of Science

Women in the History of Science brings together primary sources that highlight women’s involvement in scientific knowledge production around the world. Drawing on texts, images and objects, each primary source is accompanied by an explanatory text, questions to prompt discussion, and a bibliography to aid further research. Arranged by time period, covering 1200 BCE to the twenty-first century, and across 12 inclusive and far-reaching themes, this book is an invaluable companion to students and lecturers alike in exploring women’s history in the fields of science, technology, mathematics, medicine and culture.

While women are too often excluded from traditional narratives of the history of science, this book centres on the voices and experiences of women across a range of domains of knowledge. By questioning our understanding of what science is, where it happens, and who produces scientific knowledge, this book is an aid to liberating the curriculum within schools and universities.

Why Icebergs Float

From paintings and food to illness and icebergs, science is happening everywhere. Rather than follow the path of a syllabus or textbook, Andrew Morris takes examples from the science we see every day and uses them as entry points to explain a number of fundamental scientific concepts – from understanding colour to the nature of hormones – in ways that anyone can grasp. While each chapter offers a separate story, they are linked together by their fascinating relevance to our daily lives.

The topics explored in each chapter are based on hundreds of discussions the author has led with adult science learners over many years – people who came from all walks of life and had no scientific training, but had developed a burning curiosity to understand the world around them. This book encourages us to reflect on our own relationship with science and serves as an important reminder of why we should continue learning as adults.

Victorian Alchemy

Victorian Alchemy explores nineteenth-century conceptions of ancient Egypt as this extant civilisation was being ‘rediscovered’ in the modern world. With its material remnants somewhat paradoxically symbolic of both antiquity and modernity (in the very currentness of Egyptological excavations), ancient Egypt was at once evocative of ancient magical power and of cutting-edge science, a tension that might be productively conceived of as ‘alchemical’. Allusions to ancient Egypt simultaneously lent an air of legitimacy to depictions of the supernatural while projecting a sense of enchantment onto representations of cutting-edge science.

Examining literature and other cultural forms including art, photography and early film, Eleanor Dobson traces the myriad ways in which magic and science were perceived as entwined, and ancient Egypt evoked in parallel with various fields of study, from imaging technologies and astronomy, to investigations into the electromagnetic spectrum and the human mind itself. In so doing, counter to linear narratives of nineteenth-century progress, and demonstrating how ancient Egypt was more than a mere setting for Orientalist fantasies or nightmares, the book establishes how conceptions of modernity were inextricably bound up in the contemporary reception of the ancient world, and suggests how such ideas that took root and flourished in the Victorian era persist to this day.

Karl Popper, Science and Enlightenment

Here is an idea that just might save the world. It is that science, properly understood, provides us with the methodological key to the salvation of humanity. A version of this idea can be found in the works of Karl Popper. Famously, Popper argued that science cannot verify theories but can only refute them, and this is how science makes progress. Scientists are forced to think up something better, and it is this, according to Popper, that drives science forward.

But Nicholas Maxwell finds a flaw in this line of argument. Physicists only ever accept theories that are unified – theories that depict the same laws applying to the range of phenomena to which the theory applies – even though many other empirically more successful disunified theories are always available. This means that science makes a questionable assumption about the universe, namely that all disunified theories are false. Without some such presupposition as this, the whole empirical method of science breaks down.

By proposing a new conception of scientific methodology, which can be applied to all worthwhile human endeavours with problematic aims, Maxwell argues for a revolution in academic inquiry to help humanity make progress towards a better, more civilized and enlightened world.

Histories of Technology, the Environment and Modern Britain

Histories of Technology, the Environment, and Modern Britain brings together historians with a wide range of interests to take a uniquely wide-lens view of how technology and the environment have been intimately and irreversibly entangled in Britain over the last 300 years. It combines, for the first time, two perspectives with much to say about Britain since the industrial revolution: the history of technology and environmental history. Technologies are modified environments, just as nature is to varying extents engineered. Furthermore, technologies and our living and non-living environment are both predominant material forms of organisation – and self-organisation – that surround and make us. Both have changed over time, in intersecting ways.

Technologies discussed in the collection include bulldozers, submarine cables, automobiles, flood barriers, medical devices, museum displays and biotechnologies. Environments investigated include bogs, cities, farms, places of natural beauty and pollution, land and sea. The book explores this diversity but also offers an integrated framework for understanding these intersections.

A Conversation about Healthy Eating

What constitutes a healthy diet? Mainstream media and advertisers would like you to think that the answer to this question is complicated and controversial. But science, fortunately, tells us otherwise.

{::}{::}{::}A Conversation about Healthy Eating{::}** brings together all the relevant science about healthy eating in one place, and it’s exactly that – a conversation; an informal discussion **between a scientist and a friend about their eating habits,keeping the science firmly rooted in everyday life. The conversation moves from topics such as metabolism and digestion to gut bacteria, hormones, neuroscience and the immune system. All of these concepts are explained in accessible terms to help you understand the roles they play in maintaining a healthy diet.

The conversation leads to the conclusion that staying lean and healthy simply requires avoiding the overconsumption of processed foods. While this is, of course, easier said than done, science also provides clear recommendations for how you can adapt your environment and lifestyle to make it possible.

Rather than simply presenting you with the principles of healthy eating, this book will help you to develop a comprehensive understanding of the science behind the principles, including the evolutionary facts that affect the way we eat today. This understanding will allow you to ignore the noise in the media and to move forward with a healthy lifestyle that work for you.

Climate, God and Uncertainty

Climate, God and Uncertainty moves beyond Bruno Latour’s thought to understand what climate change means for philosophical anthropology and wider culture. What are, for example, the philosophical implications of climate change and its associated uncertainties?

Referring mainly to works by Latour, William James and Heinrich Rickert, Petersen develops ‘transcendental naturalism’ to reinterpret the interface between science and politics in the context of climate change. He highlights, for instance, issues such as the religious disenchantment of nature, the scientific disbelief in a plurality of value-laden perspectives, and the disregard for non-modern worldviews in politics. In developing its argument, the book makes a methodological intervention on the sort of naturalism that guides both Latour’s work and a large part of the academic field called ‘science and religion’.

Case Studies in Perioperative Medicine

Case Studies in Perioperative Medicine is an online educational resource established by leading practitioners at UCL’s Centre for Perioperative Medicine. It explores clinically relevant issues, offers authoritative guidance and provides a wide variety of learning opportunities for both students and practising clinicians in perioperative medicine, by experts and practitioners from all over the world.

Case Studies in Perioperative Medicine will be presented on our innovative, open access BOOC (Books as Open Online Content) platform. Readers can filter material by three themes, ‘Contemplating Surgery’, ‘Undergoing Surgery’ and ‘Recovering from Surgery’. New content will be added over time making this an evolving and dynamic publication. This educational resource will contribute to maintaining and enhancing readers’ knowledge, skills and attitudes across many areas of their practice in perioperative medicine.

Each succinct, peer-reviewed, clinical case study is written in a comprehensible and engaging style and focuses on a single question, prefaced with a brief case history, providing a clinical context to the question being answered. Included within the case studies will be an opportunity for readers to interact with links, images, infographics and short videos, to improve knowledge retention and reader understanding.