Book Reviews: The miller of Sneinton

1994 ◽  
Vol 48 (2) ◽  
pp. 321-322
Keyword(s):  
Marked Contrast ◽  
Isaac Newton ◽  
James Clerk Maxwell ◽  
Local Newspaper ◽  
200Th Anniversary ◽  
Lay Reader ◽  
Lord Kelvin ◽  
Michael Faraday ◽  
The Way

D.M. Cannell, George Green, Mathematician & Physicist 1793-1841 . Athlone Press, 1993. Pp. xxvi + 265, £35 (hdbk). ISBN-0-485-11433X. Most mathematicians will have used, or at least know of, Green’s Theorem and Green’s functions, but they are probably unaware of the unusual background of their eponymous creator. Green also made pioneering contributions in electricity (where he introduced the term ‘potential’), magnetism, hydrodynamics, elasticity, sound and light. Indeed, the intellectual profundity of his work, albeit encompassed in a mere ten publications, was recognized on the 200th anniversary of his birth, by the dedication of a plaque in Westminster Abbey where his name will be found amongst the greatest British men of science - Isaac Newton, John Frederick Herschel, Michael Faraday, James Clerk Maxwell, Lord Kelvin, George Gabriel Stokes, Lord Rayleigh, Lord Rutherford and J.J. Thomson. All of these had their work recognized during their own lifetime; in marked contrast, George Green, on his death, earned only a modest paragraph in a local newspaper as his sole obituary, and a grave neglected and forgotten for nearly 100 years. There are no portraits or photographs of him, no diaries or working papers, and little in the way of correspondence. Mary Cannell’s book, which is written to interest the lay reader as much as the scientific specialist, provides the background to Green’s unusual life and work.

Book reviews

2000 ◽  
Vol 54 (3) ◽  
pp. 387-408
Author(s):  
Max Perutz
Keyword(s):  
18Th Century ◽  
Isaac Newton ◽  
Natural Knowledge ◽  
Cultural Encounter ◽  
The Pacific ◽  
Science And Politics ◽  
History Of ◽  
Michael Faraday ◽  
Selection Of

Twelve book reviews in the September 2003 issue of Notes and Records : Georgina Ferry, Dorothy Hodgkin: a life . J.D. Bernal: a life in science and politics . Edited by Brenda Swann and Francis Aprahamian. Max Perutz, I wish I'd made you angry earlier. Essays on science and scientists . A. Rupert Hall, Isaac Newton: eighteenth-century perspectives . G.I. Brown, Count Rumford. The extraordinary life of a scientific genius . The correspondence of Michael Faraday , volume 4. Edited by Frank A.J.L. James. The philosopher's tree: A selection of Michael Faraday's writings . Compiled, with commentary, by Peter Day. Science and exploration in the Pacific. European voyages to the Southern Oceans in the 18th century . Edited by Margarette Lincoln. Gillian Beer, Open fields: science in cultural encounter . Rocky Kolb, Blind watchers of the sky . Jan Golinski, Making natural knowledge. Constructivism and the history of science . Simon Conway Morris, The crucible of Creation: the Burgess Shale and the rise of animals .

The Dawn of Aerodynamics

1957 ◽  
Vol 61 (555) ◽  
pp. 149-180 ◽  
Author(s):  
J. Laurence Pritchard
Keyword(s):  
Charles Darwin ◽  
Robert Boyle ◽  
Isaac Newton ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Face ◽  
James Watt ◽  
Eighteenth And Nineteenth Centuries ◽  
Lord Kelvin ◽  
Michael Faraday ◽  
British People

As individuals, those who have been born and bred and nurtured in the long, unique and formative tradition of the British people may justly claim a pride in their scientific and technical achievements over the years which cannot be claimed in such measure by any other nation. It is a claim they can make as proudly this very day as they could have done over the past three hundred years.In the main, this paper is concerned with but a small, although not unimportant, part of the scientific achievement of the Seventeenth, Eighteenth and Nineteenth centuries. It was a period, in Great Britain, of such giants as Isaac Newton, James Watt, John Dalton, Robert Boyle, Henry Cavendish, Michael Faraday, Charles Darwin, Clerk Maxwell, W. J. M. Rankine, Lord Kelvin, Lord Rayleigh, Sir Charles Parsons, Prescott Joule, C. G. Stokes, Osborne Reynolds, Sir J. J. Thomson, C. Babbage, F. W. Lanchester, and so many others whose ideas and achievements have changed the face of the world in this Twentieth century of application.

In Conversation on the Royal Exchange Theatre, Manchester

2020 ◽  
Vol 36 (4) ◽  
pp. 369-383
Author(s):  
Rachel Clements ◽  
Sarah Frankcom
Keyword(s):  
Caryl Churchill ◽  
Cultural Organization ◽  
The University ◽  
Artistic Director ◽  
University Of Manchester ◽  
The Way ◽  
Death Of A Salesman

Sarah Frankcom worked at the Royal Exchange Theatre in Manchester between 2000 and 2019, and was the venue’s first sole Artistic Director from 2014. In this interview conducted in summer 2019, she discusses her time at the theatre and what she has learned from leading a major cultural organization and working with it. She reflects on a number of her own productions at this institution, including Hamlet, The Skriker, Our Town, and Death of a Salesman, and discusses the way the theatre world has changed since the beginning of her career as she looks forward to being the director of LAMDA. Rachel Clements lectures on theatre at the University of Manchester. She has published on playwrights Caryl Churchill and Martin Crimp, among others, and has edited Methuen student editions of Lucy Prebble’s Enron and Joe Penhall’s Blue/Orange. She is Book Reviews editor of NTQ.

scholarly journals Captivating, splendid or instructive?

2020 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 66-93
Author(s):  
Peter Boot ◽  
Marijn Koolen
Keyword(s):  
Dutch Book ◽  
Impact Categories ◽  
The Impact ◽  
Affective Impact ◽  
Initial Results ◽  
The Way

Abstract What is the impact of reading fiction? We analyze online Dutch book reviews to detect overall affective impact, narrative feelings, response to style and reflection. We create a set of rules that analyze the reviews and detect the impact aspects. We evaluate the detection by asking raters about the presence of these aspects in reviews and comparing these ratings to our detection. Interrater agreements are weak to moderate; however, there is a significant correlation between the model’s predictions for all impact aspects except reflection. The detected impact correlates with book genres in the way one would expect: Narrative feelings are highest for thrillers, and stylistic response is highest for literary books. We can thus estimate some aspects of the response books evoke in readers. Initial results suggest that the appreciation of style is linked to reflection in the reader. However, the concepts underlying the impact categories need further exploration.

Gendered Ecologies

2020 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Women Writers ◽  
George Eliot ◽  
Sir Isaac Newton ◽  
Robert Boyle ◽  
Isaac Newton ◽  
Natural Domain ◽  
Diachronic Study ◽  
Natural Philosophers ◽  
Michael Faraday

Gendered Ecologies: New Materialist Interpretations of Women Writers in the Long Nineteenth Century is comprised of a diverse collection of essays featuring analyses of literary women writers, ecofeminism, feminist ecocriticism, and the value of the interrelationships that exist among human, nonhuman, and nonliving entities as part of the environs. The book presents a case for the often-disregarded literary women writers of the long nineteenth century, who were active contributors to the discourse of natural history—the diachronic study of participants as part of a vibrant community interconnected by matter. While they were not natural philosophers as in the cases of Sir Isaac Newton, Robert Boyle, and Michael Faraday among others, these women writers did engage in acute observations of materiality in space (e.g., subjects, objects, and abjects), reasoned about their findings, and encoded their discoveries of nature in their literary and artistic productions. The collection includes discussions of the works of influential literary women from the long nineteenth century—Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Shelley, Caroline Norton, Charlotte Brontë, George Eliot, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Jane Johnston Schoolcraft, Margaret Fuller, Susan Fenimore Cooper, Celia Thaxter, Laura Ingalls Wilder, Francis Wright, and Lydia Maria Child—whose multi-directional observations of animate and inanimate objects in the natural domain are based on self-made discoveries while interacting with the environs.

God and the Uniformity of Nature

2019 ◽  
pp. 97-110
Author(s):  
Matthew Stanley
Keyword(s):  
Natural World ◽  
Fine Tuning ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
James Clerk Maxwell ◽  
Modern Physics ◽  
William Thomson ◽  
Alternative Approaches ◽  
Religiously Based ◽  
John Tyndall ◽  
Lord Kelvin

Today the laws of physics are often seen as evidence for a naturalistic worldview. However, historically, physics was usually considered compatible with belief in God. Foundations of physics such as thermodynamics, uniformity of nature, and causality were seen as religiously based by physicists such as James Clerk Maxwell and William Thomson, Lord Kelvin. These were usually interpreted as evidence of design by a creative deity. In the late nineteenth century, John Tyndall and other scientific naturalists made the argument that these foundations were more sympathetic to a non-religious understanding of the natural world. With the success of this approach, twentieth-century religious physicists tended to stress non-material and experiential connections rather than looking for evidence of design. Later parts of that century saw a revival of natural theological arguments in the form of the anthropic principle and the fine-tuning problem. While modern physics is naturalistic, this was not inevitable and there were several alternative approaches common in earlier times.

Faraday and Maxwell

Lightspeed ◽  
2019 ◽  
pp. 91-111
Author(s):  
John C. H. Spence
Keyword(s):  
Displacement Current ◽  
Optical Effect ◽  
Radio Waves ◽  
Speed Of Light ◽  
Charge Balance ◽  
James Clerk Maxwell ◽  
Horse Riding ◽  
Magneto Optical Effect ◽  
Michael Faraday ◽  
First Time

The story of Michael Faraday and the development of field theory in the early nineteenth century and his discovery of the magneto-optical effect, which linked the study of optics and light to electromagnetism for the first time, and led to the discovery of the displacement current. The integration of electrostatics and electromagnetism by James Clerk Maxwell and others. How Maxwell discovered his great equations, which predict a constant speed of light and show that light is an electromagnetic wave. How the symmetry which resulted from his displacement current provided an important clue for Einstein’s theory. Maxwell’s current-charge balance apparatus, which allowed him to measure the speed of light by purely electrical means. How Maxwell’s equations were later used in the discovery of radio waves. Maxwell’s life and interests, from poetry to horse riding and guitar. Kelvin and the laying of the Atlantic cable.

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