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Through rugged ways to the stars, Harlow Shapley (ISBN 9781124074719, Charles Scribner’s Sons)
This is the autobiography of Harlow Shapley, the man who discovered size of the milky way and the place of our sun in it. Shapley considered the discovery that our sun was not in the center of the milky way as his most important contribution to our world view because it was more or less the ultimate degradation of our importance in the creation of the universe, the next step after having abandoned geocentricism and heliocentrism before. The book is based on a transcription of a two day interview when he was already eighty years old. This origin is reflected…
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Beginnings of war
‘Since wars begin in the minds of men it is in the minds of men that the defenses of peace must be constructed.‘― Clement Attlee & Archibald MacLeish
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The Story of Numbers, John McLeish (ISBN 978-0-449-90938-6, Fawcett Columbine)
The Story of Numbers explores the history of mathematics to trace the rise of various number systems in cultures from Mesopotamia to the modern Computer Era. It is not a traditional history of mathematics or a history of mathematicians. Instead it focuses on the different number systems and calculation methods that evolved in time in different cultures. It describes how the needs of these cultures influenced the development of numbers and early mathematics and how the mathematics in turn influenced the cultures. All civilisations had some counting methods but only cultures that needed elaborate calculations to predict the calender and…
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Poison
‘Science is the great antidote to the poison of enthusiasm and superstition.‘― Adam Smith
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Center of knowledge
‘Surely you mistake Cambridge. Wee are situated in as dark a corner of ye land (in terms of knowledge of world affairs) as can be well desired.‘― Roger Cotes
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Logical Proof
‘It is useless, my son. I have read Aristotle through twice and have found nothing about spots on the Sun. There are no spots on the Sun. They arise either from imperfections of your telescope or from defects in your eyes.‘― 17th century Jesuit professor
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