The Ascent of Man  32053

  • Foreword
  1. Lower than the Angels[rtoc]
    • Animal adaptation
    • The human alternative
    • Beginning in Africa
    • Fossil evidence
    • The gift of foresight
    • Evolution of the head
    • The mosaic of man
    • The cultures of the hunter
    • Across the ice ages
    • Transhumance cultures: The Lapps
    • Imagination in cave art[/rtoc]
  2. The Harvest of the Seasons[rtoc]
    • The pace of cultural evolution
    • Nomad cultures: the Bakhtiari
    • Beginnings of agriculture: wheat
    • Jericho
    • Earthquake country
    • Technology in the village
    • The wheel
    • Domestication of animals: the horse
    • War games: Buz Kashi – Settled civilisation[/rtoc]
  3. The Grain in the Stone[rtoc]
    • Coming to the New World
    • Blood group evidence of migrations
    • The actions of shaping and splitting
    • Structure and hierarchy
    • The city: Machu Picchu
    • Straight-edge architecture: Paestum
    • The Roman arch: Segovia
    • The Gothic adventure: Rheims
    • Science as architecture
    • The hidden figure: Michelangelo to Moore
    • Pleasure in construction
    • Below the visible[/rtoc]
  4. The Hidden Structure[rtoc]
    • Fire, the transforming element
    • Extraction of metals: copper
    • The structure of alloys
    • Bronze as a work of art
    • Iron to steel: the Japanese sword
    • Gold
    • The incorruptible
    • Alchemical theory of man and nature
    • Paracelsus and the coming of chemistry
    • Fire and air: Joseph Priestley
    • Antoine Lavoisier: combination can be quantified
    • John Dalton’s atomic theory[/rtoc]
  5. The Music of the Spheres[rtoc]
    • The language of numbers
    • The key to harmony: Pythagoras
    • The right-angled triangle
    • Euclid and Ptolemy at Alexandria
    • Rise of Islam
    • Arabic numbers
    • The Alhambra: patterns of space
    • Crystal symmetries
    • Perspective from Alhazen
    • Movement in time, the new dynamic
    • The mathematics of change[/rtoc]
  6. The Starry Messenger[rtoc]
    • The cycle of seasons
    • The unmapped sky: Easter Island
    • Ptolemy’s system in the Dondi Clock
    • Copernicus: the sun as centre
    • The telescope
    • Galileo opens the scientific method
    • Prohibition of the Copernican system
    • Dialogue on the two systems
    • The Inquisition
    • Galileo recants
    • The Scientific Revolution moves north[/rtoc]
  7. The Majestic Clockwork[rtoc]
    • Kepler’s laws
    • The centre of the world
    • Isaac Newton’s innovations: fluxions
    • Unfolding the spectrum
    • Gravitation and the Principia
    • The intellectual dictator
    • Challenge in satire
    • Newton’s absolute space
    • Absolute time
    • Albert Einstein
    • The traveller carries his own space and time
    • Relativity is proved
    • The new philosophy[/rtoc]
  8. The Drive for Power[rtoc]
    • The English revolution
    • Everyday technology: James Brindley
    • The revolt against privilege: Figaro
    • Benjamin Franklin and the American revolution
    • The new men: masters of iron
    • The new outlook: Wedgwood and the Lunar society
    • The driving factory
    • The new preoccupation: energy
    • The cornucopia of invention
    • The unity of nature[/rtoc]
  9. The Ladder of Creation[rtoc]
    • The naturalists
    • Charles Darwin
    • Alfred Wallace
    • Impact of South America
    • The wealth of species
    • Wallace loses his collection
    • Natural selection conceived
    • The continuity of evolution
    • Louis Pasteur: right hand, left hand
    • Chemical constants in evolution
    • The origin of life
    • The four bases
    • Are other forms of life possible?[/rtoc]
  10. World Within World[rtoc]
    • The cube of salt
    • Its elements
    • Mendeleev’s game of patience
    • The periodic table
    • J. J. Thomson: the atom has parts
    • Structure in new art
    • Structure in the atom: Rutherford and Niels Bohr
    • The life cycle of a theory
    • The nucleus has parts
    • The neutron: Chadwick and Fermi
    • Evolution of the elements
    • The second law as statistics
    • Stratified stability
    • Copying the physics of nature
    • Ludwig Boltzmann: atoms are real[/rtoc]
  11. Knowledge of Certainty[rtoc]
    • There is no absolute knowledge
    • The spectrum of invisible radiations
    • The refinement of detail
    • Gauss and the idea of uncertainty
    • The sub-structure of reality: Max Born
    • Heisenberg’s principle of uncertainty
    • The principle of tolerance: Leo Szilard
    • Science is human[/rtoc]
  12. Generation upon Generation[rtoc]
    • The voice of insurrection
    • The kitchen garden naturalist: Gregor Mendel
    • Genetics of the pea
    • Instant oblivion
    • An all-or-nothing model of inheritance
    • The magic number two: sex
    • Crick and Watson’s model of DNA
    • Replication and growth
    • Cloning of identical forms
    • Sexual choice in human diversity[/rtoc]
  13. The Long Childhood[rtoc]
    • Man, the social solitary
    • Human specificity
    • Specific development of the brain
    • Precision of the hand
    • The speech areas
    • The postponement of decision
    • The mind as an instrument of preparation
    • The democracy of the intellect
    • The moral imagination
    • The brain and the computer: John von Neumann
    • The strategy of values
    • Knowledge is our destiny
    • The commitment of man[/rtoc]
Array
(
    [_edit_lock] => Array
        (
            [0] => 1588712865:1
        )

    [_edit_last] => Array
        (
            [0] => 1
        )

    [source] => Array
        (
            [0] => "32052"
        )

    [shop] => Array
        (
            [0] => "12208"||£2.50
        )

    [ASIN] => Array
        (
            [0] => 0563104988
        )

    [ISBN] => Array
        (
            [0] => 9780563104988
        )

)

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published.

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.