On the Frontier of Science

On the Frontier of Science PDF

Author: Leah Ceccarelli

Publisher: MSU Press

Published: 2013-11-01

Total Pages: 325

ISBN-13: 087013034X

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“The frontier of science” is a metaphor that has become ubiquitous in American rhetoric, from its first appearance in the public address of early twentieth-century American intellectuals and politicians who aligned a mythic national identity with scientific research, to its more recent use in scientists’ arguments in favor of increased research funding. Here, Leah Ceccarelli explores what is selected and what is deflected when this metaphor is deployed, its effects on those who use it, and what rhetorical moves are made by those who try to counter its appeal. In her research, Ceccarelli discovers that “the frontier of science” evokes a scientist who is typically male, a risk taker, an adventurous loner—someone separated from a public that both envies and distrusts him, with a manifest destiny to penetrate the unknown. It conjures a competitive desire to claim the riches of a new territory before others can do the same. Closely reading the public address of scientists and politicians and the reception of their audiences, this book shows how the frontier of science metaphor constrains American speakers, helping to guide the ends of scientific research in particular ways and sometimes blocking scientists from attaining the very goals they set out to achieve.

Frontiers of Science

Frontiers of Science PDF

Author: Cameron B. Strang

Publisher: UNC Press Books

Published: 2018-06-13

Total Pages: 376

ISBN-13: 1469640481

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Cameron Strang takes American scientific thought and discoveries away from the learned societies, museums, and teaching halls of the Northeast and puts the production of knowledge about the natural world in the context of competing empires and an expanding republic in the Gulf South. People often dismissed by starched northeasterners as nonintellectuals--Indian sages, African slaves, Spanish officials, Irishmen on the make, clearers of land and drivers of men--were also scientific observers, gatherers, organizers, and reporters. Skulls and stems, birds and bugs, rocks and maps, tall tales and fertile hypotheses came from them. They collected, described, and sent the objects that scientists gazed on and interpreted in polite Philadelphia. They made knowledge. Frontiers of Science offers a new framework for approaching American intellectual history, one that transcends political and cultural boundaries and reveals persistence across the colonial and national eras. The pursuit of knowledge in the United States did not cohere around democratic politics or the influence of liberty. It was, as in other empires, divided by multiple loyalties and identities, organized through contested hierarchies of ethnicity and place, and reliant on violence. By discovering the lost intellectual history of one region, Strang shows us how to recover a continent for science.

Science, the Endless Frontier

Science, the Endless Frontier PDF

Author: Vannevar Bush

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Published: 2021-02-02

Total Pages: 186

ISBN-13: 069120165X

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The classic case for why government must support science—with a new essay by physicist and former congressman Rush Holt on what democracy needs from science today Science, the Endless Frontier is recognized as the landmark argument for the essential role of science in society and government’s responsibility to support scientific endeavors. First issued when Vannevar Bush was the director of the US Office of Scientific Research and Development during the Second World War, this classic remains vital in making the case that scientific progress is necessary to a nation’s health, security, and prosperity. Bush’s vision set the course for US science policy for more than half a century, building the world’s most productive scientific enterprise. Today, amid a changing funding landscape and challenges to science’s very credibility, Science, the Endless Frontier resonates as a powerful reminder that scientific progress and public well-being alike depend on the successful symbiosis between science and government. This timely new edition presents this iconic text alongside a new companion essay from scientist and former congressman Rush Holt, who offers a brief introduction and consideration of what society needs most from science now. Reflecting on the report’s legacy and relevance along with its limitations, Holt contends that the public’s ability to cope with today’s issues—such as public health, the changing climate and environment, and challenging technologies in modern society—requires a more capacious understanding of what science can contribute. Holt considers how scientists should think of their obligation to society and what the public should demand from science, and he calls for a renewed understanding of science’s value for democracy and society at large. A touchstone for concerned citizens, scientists, and policymakers, Science, the Endless Frontier endures as a passionate articulation of the power and potential of science.

Fermilab

Fermilab PDF

Author: Lillian Hoddeson

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2009-08-01

Total Pages: 515

ISBN-13: 0226346250

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Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, located in the western suburbs of Chicago, has stood at the frontier of high-energy physics for forty years. Fermilab is the first history of this laboratory and of its powerful accelerators told from the point of view of the people who built and used them for scientific discovery. Focusing on the first two decades of research at Fermilab, during the tenure of the laboratory’s charismatic first two directors, Robert R. Wilson and Leon M. Lederman, the book traces the rise of what they call “megascience,” the collaborative struggle to conduct large-scale international experiments in a climate of limited federal funding. In the midst of this new climate, Fermilab illuminates the growth of the modern research laboratory during the Cold War and captures the drama of human exploration at the cutting edge of science.

On the Frontier of Science

On the Frontier of Science PDF

Author: Leah Ceccarelli

Publisher:

Published: 2013

Total Pages:

ISBN-13: 9781628960334

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The frontier of science is a metaphor that has become ubiquitous in American rhetoric, from its first appearance in the public address of early twentieth-century American intellectuals and politicians who aligned a mythic national identity with scientific research, to its more recent use in scientists' arguments in favor of increased research funding. Here, Leah Ceccarelli explores what is selected and what is deflected when this metaphor is deployed, its effects on those who use it, and what rhetorical moves are made by those who try to counter its appeal. In her research, Ceccarelli discovers that the frontier of science evokes a scientist who is typically male, a risk taker, an adventurous loner, someone separated from a public that both envies and distrusts him, with a manifest destiny to penetrate the unknown. It conjures a competitive desire to claim the riches of a new territory before others can do the same. Closely reading the public address of scientists and politicians and the reception of their audiences, this book shows how the frontier of science metaphor constrains American speakers, helping to guide the ends of scientific research in particular ways and sometimes blocking scientists from attaining the very goals they set out to achieve.

The Great Unknown

The Great Unknown PDF

Author: Marcus du Sautoy

Publisher: Penguin

Published: 2017-04-11

Total Pages: 464

ISBN-13: 0735221812

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“An engaging voyage into some of the great mysteries and wonders of our world." --Alan Lightman, author of Einstein’s Dream and The Accidental Universe “No one is better at making the recondite accessible and exciting.” —Bill Bryson Brain Pickings and Kirkus Best Science Book of the Year Every week seems to throw up a new discovery, shaking the foundations of what we know. But are there questions we will never be able to answer—mysteries that lie beyond the predictive powers of science? In this captivating exploration of our most tantalizing unknowns, Marcus du Sautoy invites us to consider the problems in cosmology, quantum physics, mathematics, and neuroscience that continue to bedevil scientists and creative thinkers who are at the forefront of their fields. At once exhilarating, mind-bending, and compulsively readable, The Great Unknown challenges us to consider big questions—about the nature of consciousness, what came before the big bang, and what lies beyond our horizons—while taking us on a virtuoso tour of the great breakthroughs of the past and celebrating the men and women who dared to tackle the seemingly impossible and had the imagination to come up with new ways of seeing the world.

Our Scientific Frontier

Our Scientific Frontier PDF

Author: Sir William Patrick Andrew

Publisher:

Published: 1880

Total Pages: 116

ISBN-13:

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The "scientific frontier" is a term used by Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli (Lord Beaconsfield) of Great Britain in 1878 to denote a border between British India (in present-day Pakistan) and Afghanistan, which could be occupied and defended according to the requirements of the science of military strategy, as opposed to the existing frontier, which had been formed by a haphazard pattern of British expansion through agreements and annexations. The term subsequently figured prominently in British discussions about the defense of British India from a possible Russian invasion through Afghanistan. Our Scientific Frontier, published toward the end of the Second Anglo-Afghan War (1878-80), is an analysis of this subject, written to influence the British debate on the terms of peace. The author, William Patrick Andrew, was chairman of the Scinde, Punjab, and Delhi Railway Company, and thus an expert on logistics and transport in India and along its frontiers. The book contains chapters on the Northwest Frontier, the history, geography, and economy of Afghanistan, the independent border tribes, mountain passes, probable routes of invasion from Afghanistan into India, and the "Powindahs, or Soldier-Merchants of Afghanistan." Three appendices cover the Sherpur entrenchments that were part of the defense of Kabul, the Bolan and Khyber railways (neither of which was constructed until after the period discussed), and transport by rail of troops, horses, guns, and war matériel in India.

The Changing Frontier

The Changing Frontier PDF

Author: Adam B. Jaffe

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2015-08-24

Total Pages: 441

ISBN-13: 022628686X

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In 1945, Vannevar Bush, founder of Raytheon and one-time engineering dean at MIT, delivered a report to the president of the United States that argued for the importance of public support for science, and the importance of science for the future of the nation. The report, Science: The Endless Frontier, set America on a path toward strong and well-funded institutions of science, creating an intellectual architecture that still defines scientific endeavor today. In The Changing Frontier, Adam B. Jaffe and Benjamin Jones bring together a group of prominent scholars to consider the changes in science and innovation in the ensuing decades. The contributors take on such topics as changes in the organization of scientific research, the geography of innovation, modes of entrepreneurship, and the structure of research institutions and linkages between science and innovation. An important analysis of where science stands today, The Changing Frontier will be invaluable to practitioners and policy makers alike.

The New Frontier of Religion and Science

The New Frontier of Religion and Science PDF

Author: J. Hick

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2010-04-09

Total Pages: 244

ISBN-13: 0230277608

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This is the first major response to the challenge of neuroscience to religion. It considers eastern forms of religious experience as well as Christian viewpoints and challenges the idea of a mind identical to, or a by-product of, brain activity. It explores religion as inner experience of the Transcendent, and suggests a modern spirituality.

People's Science

People's Science PDF

Author: Ruha Benjamin

Publisher: Stanford University Press

Published: 2013-05-22

Total Pages: 268

ISBN-13: 0804786739

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“An engaging, insightful, and challenging call to examine both the rhetoric and reality of innovation and inclusion in science and science policy.” —Daniel R. Morrison, American Journal of Sociology Stem cell research has sparked controversy and heated debate since the first human stem cell line was derived in 1998. Too frequently these debates devolve to simple judgments—good or bad, life-saving medicine or bioethical nightmare, symbol of human ingenuity or our fall from grace—ignoring the people affected. With this book, Ruha Benjamin moves the terms of debate to focus on the shifting relationship between science and society, on the people who benefit—or don’t—from regenerative medicine and what this says about our democratic commitments to an equitable society. People’s Science uncovers the tension between scientific innovation and social equality, taking the reader inside California’s 2004 stem cell initiative, the first of many state referenda on scientific research, to consider the lives it has affected. Benjamin reveals the promise and peril of public participation in science, illuminating issues of race, disability, gender, and socio-economic class that serve to define certain groups as more or less deserving in their political aims and biomedical hopes. Ultimately, Ruha Benjamin argues that without more deliberate consideration about how scientific initiatives can and should reflect a wider array of social concerns, stem cell research—from African Americans’ struggle with sickle cell treatment to the recruitment of women as tissue donors—still risks excluding many. Even as regenerative medicine is described as a participatory science for the people, Benjamin asks us to consider if “the people” ultimately reflects our democratic ideals.