Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments

Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments
Author: Saidiya Hartman
Publisher: National Geographic Books
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2020-01-14
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0393357627

A breathtaking exploration of the lives of young black women in the early twentieth century. In Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments, Saidiya Hartman examines the revolution of black intimate life that unfolded in Philadelphia and New York at the beginning of the twentieth century. Free love, common-law and transient marriages, serial partners, cohabitation outside of wedlock, queer relations, and single motherhood were among the sweeping changes that altered the character of everyday life and challenged traditional Victorian beliefs about courtship, love, and marriage. Hartman narrates the story of this radical social transformation against the grain of the prevailing century-old argument about the crisis of the black family. In wrestling with the question of what a free life is, many young black women created forms of intimacy and kinship that were indifferent to the dictates of respectability and outside the bounds of law. They cleaved to and cast off lovers, exchanged sex to subsist, and revised the meaning of marriage. Longing and desire fueled their experiments in how to live. They refused to labor like slaves or to accept degrading conditions of work. Beautifully written and deeply researched, Wayward Lives recreates the experience of young urban black women who desired an existence qualitatively different than the one that had been scripted for them—domestic service, second-class citizenship, and respectable poverty—and whose intimate revolution was apprehended as crime and pathology. For the first time, young black women are credited with shaping a cultural movement that transformed the urban landscape. Through a melding of history and literary imagination, Wayward Lives recovers their radical aspirations and insurgent desires.

Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments

Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments
Author: Saidiya V. Hartman
Publisher: W. W. Norton
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2019
Genre: HISTORY
ISBN: 9780393285673

Traces a time of radical transformation of black life in early twentieth-century America, revealing how a large number of black women forged relationships, families, and jobs that were more empowered and typically indifferent to moral dictates.

The Ten Most Beautiful Experiments

The Ten Most Beautiful Experiments
Author: George Johnson
Publisher: Vintage
Total Pages: 210
Release: 2009-03-10
Genre: Science
ISBN: 140003423X

A dazzling, irresistible collection of the ten most groundbreaking and beautiful experiments in scientific history. With the attention to detail of a historian and the storytelling ability of a novelist, New York Times science writer George Johnson celebrates these groundbreaking experiments and re-creates a time when the world seemed filled with mysterious forces and scientists were in awe of light, electricity, and the human body. Here, we see Galileo staring down gravity, Newton breaking apart light, and Pavlov studying his now famous dogs. This is science in its most creative, hands-on form, when ingenuity of the mind is the most useful tool in the lab and the rewards of a well-considered experiment are on exquisite display.

The Beauty of Chemistry

The Beauty of Chemistry
Author: Philip Ball
Publisher: MIT Press
Total Pages: 391
Release: 2021-05-11
Genre: Science
ISBN: 0262044412

Images and text capture the astonishing beauty of the chemical processes that create snowflakes, bubbles, flames, and other wonders of nature. Chemistry is not just about microscopic atoms doing inscrutable things; it is the process that makes flowers and galaxies. We rely on it for bread-baking, vegetable-growing, and producing the materials of daily life. In stunning images and illuminating text, this book captures chemistry as it unfolds. Using such techniques as microphotography, time-lapse photography, and infrared thermal imaging, The Beauty of Chemistry shows us how chemistry underpins the formation of snowflakes, the science of champagne, the colors of flowers, and other wonders of nature and technology. We see the marvelous configurations of chemical gardens; the amazing transformations of evaporation, distillation, and precipitation; heat made visible; and more.

Meselson, Stahl, and the Replication of DNA

Meselson, Stahl, and the Replication of DNA
Author: Frederic Lawrence Holmes
Publisher: Yale University Press
Total Pages: 516
Release: 2008-10-01
Genre: Science
ISBN: 0300129661

In 1957 two young scientists, Matthew Meselson and Frank Stahl, produced a landmark experiment confirming that DNA replicates as predicted by the double helix structure Watson and Crick had recently proposed. It also gained immediate renown as a “most beautiful” experiment whose beauty was tied to its simplicity. Yet the investigative path that led to the experiment was anything but simple, Frederic L. Holmes shows in this masterful account of Meselson and Stahl’s quest. This book vividly reconstructs the complex route that led to the Meselson-Stahl experiment and provides an inside view of day-to-day scientific research--its unpredictability, excitement, intellectual challenge, and serendipitous windfalls, as well as its frustrations, unexpected diversions away from original plans, and chronic uncertainty. Holmes uses research logs, experimental films, correspondence, and interviews with the participants to record the history of Meselson and Stahl’s research, from their first thinking about the problem through the publication of their dramatic results. Holmes also reviews the scientific community’s reception of the experiment, the experiment’s influence on later investigations, and the reasons for its reputation as an exceptionally beautiful experiment.

Experiments in Skin

Experiments in Skin
Author: Thuy Linh Nguyen Tu
Publisher: Duke University Press
Total Pages: 154
Release: 2021-02-22
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1478013133

In Experiments in Skin Thuy Linh Nguyen Tu examines the ongoing influence of the Vietnam War on contemporary ideas about race and beauty. Framing skin as the site around which these ideas have been formed, Tu foregrounds the histories of militarism in the production of US biomedical knowledge and commercial cosmetics. She uncovers the efforts of wartime scientists in the US Military Dermatology Research Program to alleviate the environmental and chemical risks to soldiers' skin. These dermatologists sought relief for white soldiers while denying that African American soldiers and Vietnamese civilians were also vulnerable to harm. Their experiments led to the development of pharmaceutical cosmetics, now used by women in Ho Chi Minh City to tend to their skin, and to grapple with the damage caused by the war's lingering toxicity. In showing how the US military laid the foundations for contemporary Vietnamese consumption of cosmetics and practices of beauty, Tu shows how the intersecting histories of militarism, biomedicine, race, and aesthetics become materially and metaphorically visible on skin.

Elegant Solutions

Elegant Solutions
Author: Philip Ball
Publisher: Royal Society of Chemistry
Total Pages: 221
Release: 2015-11-09
Genre: Science
ISBN: 1782625461

Devising and performing a scientific experiment is an art, and it is common to hear scientists talk about the 'beauty' of an experiment. What does this mean in chemistry, the experimental science par excellence? And what are the most beautiful chemical experiments of all time? This book offers ten suggestions for where beauty might reside in experimental chemistry. In some cases the beauty lies in the clarity of conception; sometimes it is a feature of the instrumental design. But for chemistry, there can also be a unique beauty in the way atoms are put together to make new molecules, substances not known in nature. The ten experiments described here offer a window into the way that chemists think and work, and how what they do affects the rest of science and the wider world. This book aims to stimulate the reader to think anew about some of the relationships and differences between science and art, and to challenge some of the common notions about particular 'famous experiments'. Elegant Solutions: Ten Beautiful Experiments in Chemistry is accessible to all readers, including those without a scientific background and can provide an unusual point of entry into some of the basic concepts of chemistry. Phillip Ball is a renowned, prolific, award winning science writer.

The Prism and the Pendulum

The Prism and the Pendulum
Author: Robert Crease
Publisher: Random House Trade Paperbacks
Total Pages: 274
Release: 2004-10-12
Genre: Science
ISBN: 0812970624

Is science beautiful? Yes, argues acclaimed philosopher and historian of science Robert P. Crease in this engaging exploration of history’s most beautiful experiments. The result is an engrossing journey through nearly 2,500 years of scientific innovation. Along the way, we encounter glimpses into the personalities and creative thinking of some of the field’s most interesting figures. We see the first measurement of the earth’s circumference, accomplished in the third century B.C. by Eratosthenes using sticks, shadows, and simple geometry. We visit Foucault’s mesmerizing pendulum, a cannonball suspended from the dome of the Panthéon in Paris that allows us to see the rotation of the earth on its axis. We meet Galileo—the only scientist with two experiments in the top ten—brilliantly drawing on his musical training to measure the speed of falling bodies. And we travel to the quantum world, in the most beautiful experiment of all. We also learn why these ten experiments exert such a powerful hold on our imaginations. From the ancient world to cutting-edge physics, these ten exhilarating moments reveal something fundamental about the world, pulling us out of confusion and revealing nature’s elegance. The Prism and the Pendulum brings us face-to-face with the wonder of science.

Experiments on Reality

Experiments on Reality
Author: Tim Robinson
Publisher: Penguin UK
Total Pages: 208
Release: 2019-09-05
Genre: Travel
ISBN: 024198730X

Long recognized as perhaps the greatest non-fiction writer at work in Ireland, for his vast, polymathic accounts of nature and culture in the Aran Islands and Connemara, Tim Robinson is also an essayist of genius whose fascinations range across the globe. In Experiments on Reality, he shines the light of his intelligence on his own life, and on some of the most fascinating questions in science and culture. Robinson brings us to his boyhood in Yorkshire, National Service in Malaya in the 1950s, and his years as a visual artist in Istanbul, Vienna and London. He revisits some of the scenes of his researches for the maps he made of Aran and Connemara, places that continue to throw up remarkable stories and puzzles. And he performs astonishing literary thought-experiments, playing with the boundaries of the essay form, scientific inquiry, and storytelling. Experiments on Reality is a masterpiece from one of the great minds of our time. 'One of the greatest of all landscape writers ... When the material world is brought forth for us so beautifully, with such rapt attention and illuminating insight, we are reminded of how lucky we are to be part of it' Fintan O'Toole, Irish Times PRAISE FOR THE CONNEMARA TRILOGY: 'One of the most remarkable non-fiction projects undertaken in English' Robert MacFarlane, Spectator 'Robinson is a marvel ... the supreme practitioner of geo-graphy, the writing of places' Fintan O'Toole, Observer Books of the Year 'One of contemporary Ireland's finest literary stylists ... This is a book that does justice, in every sense of that phrase, to the frequently betrayed people whose stories it incarnates, and to their strange and beautiful corner of the world' Joseph O'Connor, Guardian 'A masterpiece of travel and topographical writing and a miraculous, vivid and engrossing meditation on landscape and history and the sacred mood of places' Colm Tóibín, Irish Times Books of the Year 'One of the finest of contemporary prose stylists' John Burnside, Irish Times 'He is that rarest of phenomena, a scientist and an artist, and his method is to combine scientific rigour with artistic reverie in a seamless blend that both informs and delights.' John Banville, Guardian 'Breathtaking ... the West of Ireland has found its ultimate laureate' Patricia Craig, TLS 'Dazzling ... an indubitable classic' Giles Foden, Condé Nast Traveller

Great Scientific Experiments

Great Scientific Experiments
Author: Rom Harre
Publisher: Courier Corporation
Total Pages: 226
Release: 2013-01-17
Genre: Science
ISBN: 0486143600

Vivid, readable, accurate tales of landmark inquiries include Aristotle's work on embryology of the chick, Galileo's discovery of the law of descent, Newton's experiment on nature of colors, more.