#215 - Steven Weinberg - The First Three Minutes

Author or Editor: Steven Weinberg
Publisher: Fontana Paperbacks
Published: 2006
ISBN: 1 904048 62 5
Pages: 174
Size: 1,81MB

It is a remarkable thing to be able to say just what the universe was like at the end of the first second or the first minute or the first year. To a physicist, the exhilarating thing is to be able to work things out numerically, to be able to say that at such and such a time the temperature and density and chemical composition of the universe had such 10 The First Three Minutes and such values. True, we are not absolutely certain about all this, but it is exciting that we are now able to speak of such things with any confidence at all. It was this excitement that I wanted to convey to the reader.

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#214 - Sean Martin - Alchemy and Alchemists

Author or Editor: Sean Martin
Publisher: Pocket Essentials
Published: 2006
ISBN: 1 904048 62 5
Pages: 592
Size: 3,25MB

Alchemy has been with us since the beginning of recorded history. It has been present in almost every culture, from Old Kingdom Egypt and the China of Lao Tzu; from the Greece of Alexander the Great to the era of Islamic conquest; from the islands of the Indonesian archipelago to the twilight world of Victorian occultism. It has been called ‘the mightiest secret that a man [or woman] can possess’, yet it has also been derided as ‘the history of an error’. It has often been portrayed as a fraudulent, delusional quest for wealth and worldly power through the attempt to transmute base metals into gold, but has also been regarded as a Divine art, the highest gift of God, one that should only be practiced by the sincere seeker and the pure of heart.

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#213 - R.R. Hassin - The New Unconscious

Author or Editor: R.R. Hassin
Publisher: Oxford University Press, Inc.
Published: 2005
ISBN: 0-19-514995-5
Pages: 592
Size: 3,25MB

Over the past decade or two, a new picture of unconscious processes has emerged from a variety of disciplines that are broadly part of cognitive science. Unconscious processes seem to be capable of doing many things that were, not so long ago, thought of as requiring mental resources and conscious processes. These range from complex information processing through behavior to goal pursuit and self-regulation. Much has changed since Kihlstrom’s (1987) description of the “cognitive unconscious.” This collection of chapters provides a sampling of some of the most important developments at the heart of this new picture.

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#212 - M. Heifetz and W. Tirion - A Walk through the Southern Sky

Author or Editor: M. Heifetz and W. Tirion
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 2007
ISBN: 9780521689458
Pages:
Size:

From the time of early humans, people have looked at the stars to help them navigate across seas and deserts, know when to plant and to harvest, establish their legends, mark the change of seasons and even align their temples of worship.

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#211 - Thomas L.Friedman - The World Is Flat

Author or Editor: Thomas L.Friedman
Publisher: Farrar
Published: 2005
ISBN: 0 374 29288 4
Pages: 332
Size: 1,64MB

Your Highnesses, as Catholic Christians, and princes who love and promote the holy Christian faith, and are enemies of the doctrine of Mahomet, and of all idolatry and heresy, determined to send me, Christopher Columbus, to the above-mentioned countries of India, to see the said princes, people, and territories, and to learn their disposition and the proper method of converting them to our holy faith; and furthermore directed that I should not proceed by land to the East, as is customary, but by a Westerly route, in which direction we have hitherto no certain evidence that anyone has gone.

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#210 - Wendy Wheeler - The Whole Creature

Author or Editor: Wendy Wheeler
Publisher: Lawrence & Wishart
Published: 2006
ISBN: 1 905007 30 2
Pages: 173
Size: 1,69MB

In this book, and following in an honourable tradition which I have found best expressed in the work of Raymond Williams, I have wanted to present a good materialist argument about the nature of human sociality. My argument, briefly stated, is simple: while each and every one of us is manifestly an individual, whose life and wellbeing matters, humans and their wellbeing are not most fully understood unless the fundamentally social nature of human existence is properly taken into account. This – our fundamental sociality – is lived in our inner, as well as outer, world; and it is emotional as well as physical; and all this – our essential social being – is written on our bodies in terms of flourishing or (its opposite) illness.

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#209 - William Desmond - Is There a Sabbath for Thought?

Author or Editor: William Desmond
Publisher: Fordham University Press
Published: 2005
ISBN: 0-8232-2372-8
Pages: 364
Size: 3,37MB

I remember a time when to mention God or religion in the company of advanced intellectuals was like mentioning sex in a prudish Victorian drawing room. An icy silence would descend, and the silence communicated more than overt argument possibly could: we do not now talk of these things. I have an acute memory of this—for it is within my living memory. And now? There are those I remember who danced in Dionysian sandals but who now wear the penitential rags of ethics. I know dancers who have become sandwich-board ad men for capitalist greed—handsomely waged for their conversion to what the times require.

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