Author: John Playfair
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 2011-06-02
Total Pages: 71
ISBN-13: 110807250X
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →Narrative of the life of geologist James Hutton, written by his close friend John Playfair and first published in 1805.
Author: Ray Perman
Publisher: Birlinn Ltd
Published: 2022-09-01
Total Pages: 330
ISBN-13: 1788855248
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →Discover one of the Scottish Enlightenment's brightest stars. Among the giants of the Scottish Enlightenment, the name of James Hutton is overlooked. Yet his Theory of the Earth revolutionised the way we think about how our planet was formed and laid the foundation for the science of geology. He was in his time a doctor, a farmer, a businessman, a chemist yet he described himself as a philosopher – a seeker after truth. A friend of James Watt and of Adam Smith, he was a polymath, publishing papers on subjects as diverse as why it rains and a theory of language. He shunned status and official position, refused to give up his strong Scots accent and vulgar speech, loved jokes and could start a party in an empty room. Yet much of his story remains a mystery. His papers, library and mineral collection all vanished after his death and only a handful of letters survive. He seemed to be a lifelong bachelor, yet had a secret son whom he supported throughout his life. This book uses new sources and original documents to bring Hutton the man to life and places him firmly among the geniuses of his time.
Author: Imperial Library, Calcutta
Publisher:
Published: 1908
Total Pages: 570
ISBN-13:
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →Author: Calcutta (India). Imperial library
Publisher:
Published: 1904
Total Pages: 384
ISBN-13:
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →Author: David Roger Oldroyd
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Published: 1996
Total Pages: 462
ISBN-13: 9780674883826
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →Thinking about the Earth is a history of the geological tradition of Western science. David Oldroyd traverses such topics as "mechanical" and "historicist" views of the earth, map-work, chemical analyses of rocks and minerals, geomorphology, experimental petrology, seismology, theories of mountain building, and geochemistry.
Author: Alice E. Jacoby
Publisher: Xlibris Corporation
Published: 2016-07-29
Total Pages: 171
ISBN-13: 1524527920
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →An examination of all eighteenth-century historical works produced by Scots is not the intention of this book, which is instead a case study of a limited number of Scottish eighteenth-century historical writings, here designated as developmental history. Since this is a term new to historiography, some explanation is in order. Prior publications on eighteenth-century historical writings of the type being explored here have used the terms conjectural or theoretical history or new history.
Author: Indianapolis Public Library
Publisher:
Published: 1904
Total Pages: 256
ISBN-13:
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →Author: David Shackleton
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2023-08-11
Total Pages: 225
ISBN-13: 0192857746
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →British Modernism and the Anthropocene: Experiments with Time assesses the environmental politics of modernism in relation to the idea of the Anthropocene--a proposed geological epoch in which humans have fundamentally changed the Earth System. The early twentieth century was marked by environmental transformations that were so complex and happened on such great scales that they defied representation. Modernist novelists responded with a range of innovative narrative forms that started to make environmental crisis on a planetary scale visible. Paradoxically, however, it is their failures to represent such a crisis that achieve the greatest success. David Shackleton explores how British modernists employed types of narrative breakdown--including fragmentation and faltering passages devoid of events--to expose the limitations of human schemes of meaning, negotiate the relationship between different scales and types of time, produce knowledge of ecological risk, and register various forms of non-human agency. Situating modernism in the context of fossil fuel energy systems, plantation monocultures, climate change, and species extinctions, Shackleton traces how H.G. Wells, D.H. Lawrence, Olive Moore, Virginia Woolf, and Jean Rhys undertook experiments with time in their novels that refigure history and the historical situations into which they were thrown. Ultimately, British Modernism and the Anthropocene shows how modernist novels provide rich resources for rethinking the current environmental crisis, and cultivating new structures of environmental care and concern.
Author: Pascal Richet
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Published: 2009-10-15
Total Pages: 487
ISBN-13: 0226712893
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →The quest to pinpoint the age of the Earth is nearly as old as humanity itself. For most of history, people trusted mythology or religion to provide the answer, even though nature abounds with clues to the past of the Earth and the stars. In A Natural History of Time, geophysicist Pascal Richet tells the fascinating story of how scientists and philosophers examined those clues and from them built a chronological scale that has made it possible to reconstruct the history of nature itself. Richet begins his story with mythological traditions, which were heavily influenced by the seasons and almost uniformly viewed time cyclically. The linear history promulgated by Judaism, with its story of creation, was an exception, and it was that tradition that drove early Christian attempts to date the Earth. For instance, in 169 CE, the bishop of Antioch, for instance declared that the world had been in existence for “5,698 years and the odd months and days.” Until the mid-eighteenth century, such natural timescales derived from biblical chronologies prevailed, but, Richet demonstrates, with the Scientific Revolution geological and astronomical evidence for much longer timescales began to accumulate. Fossils and the developing science of geology provided compelling evidence for periods of millions and millions of years—a scale that even scientists had difficulty grasping. By the end of the twentieth century, new tools such as radiometric dating had demonstrated that the solar system is four and a half billion years old, and the universe itself about twice that, though controversial questions remain. The quest for time is a story of ingenuity and determination, and like a geologist, Pascal Richet carefully peels back the strata of that history, giving us a chance to marvel at each layer and truly appreciate how far our knowledge—and our planet—have come.