Pantaneto Introductory Physics Series – Seven titles in this series have just become available and can be ordered direct from the publishers here.
Mindboggling: Preliminaries to a science of the mind by Roy Harris. Do you have a mind? Answers to this question have divided Western thinkers for centuries, and still do. Mindboggling sets out to identify a nucleus of basic issues about the mind, and present the main arguments for and against in each case. Targeted to a lay readership, each chapter discusses a different theory, myth or idea about the mind. Anticipate wails from theorists whose theories have been given short shrift. Mindboggling is available from Amazon (including Kindle), from Bookshops or direct from Publishers.
Science on Television by Bienvenido León.
The book is a clear and systematic guide to the narrative and rhetorical techniques used by science documentary filmmakers. The book is priced at £18.50, but for direct orders we are offering a 20% discount. The book is also available on Amazon Kindle.
Motivating Science is a collection of articles from the first five years of The Pantaneto Forum. We are offering a 20% discount for direct orders. The book is also available on Amazon Kindle.
Editorial
“Can One Book Really Transform Your Career?” In his article the late Robert Fuller asks and answers this question by referring to a book by Jean Piaget and Bärbel Inhelder. There are many famous books in science but for individual scientists there is often one book which makes such a profound impression that it can be described as life changing. As the Pantaneto Forum has reached, with this issue, the grand age of fifteen years, I invite contributions from readers who would like to nominate a book that has had a career changing effect on them.
Seeing science as a form of scientific communication enhances the teaching of the Nature of Science in schools and universities. So argues Kristian Nielsen in “Scientific Communication and the nature of Science”. According to Nielsen: “Scientific communication brings about and extends knowledge, while also tying scientists together in communities of inquirers”.
The ghost of C.P.Snow and his famous “Two Cultures” lecture, which drew attention to the divide between literature and science, still haunts debate today on this topic. In McCool’s and Russo’s article “When I heard the Learn’d Astronomer” they analyse the precursors to Snow’s lecture.
Those who study physics have at some stage been taught about Maxwell’s demon, but for most of us it is not a topic that we devote much attention to. In Craig Callender’s article “A Collision between Dynamics and Thermodynamics” he analyses some of the problems and solutions to questions raised on this subject and finds that the situation is far from straightforward.
The proceedings of the Science Matters conference, which we reported in Issue 28, October 2007, have been published and are available from the publishers – World Scientific.
Nigel Sanitt Editor
ISSN 1741-1572
Contents
Articles
Can One Book Really Transform Your Career? Robert Fuller
Scientific Communication and the nature of Science, Kristian H. Nielsen
A Collision between Dynamics and Thermodynamics, Craig Callender