The book describes how the scientific account of the world arose among the Greeks and developed in the Middle Ages.

"The entries follow an elaborate organizational plan, which amounts to a new classification of knowledge, its institutional settings, and its applications. This plan is reprinted in the opening pages of the Guide." "Thoroughly cross-referenced, and accented with attractive black and white artwork, no other source is as systematic and authoritative or as informative and inviting in its coverage of physics, astronomy and planetary science."--BOOK JACKET.

A treasury of 125 archival articles covers more than a century of scientific breakthroughs, setbacks and mysteries and includes pieces by Pulitzer Prize-winning writers, includes Malcolm W. Browne on antimatter, James Glanz on string theory and George Johnson on quantum physics.

Studies of stellar formation in galaxies have a profound impact on our understanding of the present and the early universe. The book describes complex physical processes involved in the creation of stars and during their young lives. It illustrates how these processes reveal themselves from radio wavelengths to high energy X-rays and gamma -rays, with special reference towards high energy signatures. Several sections devoted to key analysis techniques demonstrate how modern research in this field is pursued.

Fans of Chris Ferrie's ABCs of Biology, ABCs of Space, and Quantum Physics for Babies will love this introduction to aerospace engineering for babies and toddlers! Help your future genius become the smartest baby in the room! It only takes a small spark to ignite a child's mind. Written by an expert, Rocket Science for Babies is a colorfully simple introduction to aerospace engineering. Babies (and grownups!) will learn about the basics of how lift and thrust make things fly. With a tongue-in-cheek approach that adults will love, this installment of the Baby University board book series is the perfect way to introduce basic concepts to even the youngest scientists. After all, it's never too early to become a rocket scientist! If you're looking for engineer board books, infant science books, or more Baby University board books to surprise your little one, look no further! Rocket Science for Babies offers fun early learning for your little scientist!

High-energy astrophysics has unveiled a Universe very different from that only known from optical observations. It has revealed many types of objects in which typical variability timescales are as short as years, months, days, and hours (in quasars, X-ray binaries, etc), and even down to milli-seconds in gamma ray bursts. The sources of energy that are encountered are only very seldom nuclear fusion, and most of the time gravitation, a paradox when one thinks that gravitation is, by many orders of magnitude, the weakest of the fundamental interactions. The understanding of these objects' physical conditions and the processes revealed by high-energy astrophysics in the last decades is nowadays part of astrophysicists' culture, even of those active in other domains of astronomy. This book evolved from lectures given to master and PhD students at the University of Geneva since the early 1990s. It aims at providing astronomers and physicists intending to be active in high-energy astrophysics a broad basis on which they should be able to build the more specific knowledge they will need. While in the first part of the book the physical processes are described and derived in detail, the second part studies astrophysical objects in which high-energy astrophysics processes are crucial. This two-pronged approach will help students recognise physical processes by their observational signatures in contexts that may differ widely from those presented here.

The writings of more than 60 authors including Isaac Asimov, Albert Einstein, Stephen Hawking, Pierre Curie, Primo Levi and James Gleick, are represented in this volume. Each expresses a perspective on the Sciences.