Author: Martin J. S. Rudwick Publisher: University of Chicago Press ISBN: 9780226731056 Category : Art Languages : en Pages : 298
Book Description
How did the earth look in prehistoric times? Scientists and artists collaborated during the half-century prior to the publication of Darwin's Origin of Species to produce the first images of dinosaurs and the world they inhabited. Their interpretations, informed by recent fossil discoveries, were the first efforts to represent the prehistoric world based on sources other than the Bible. Martin J. S. Rudwick presents more than a hundred rare illustrations from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to explore the implications of reconstructing a past no one has ever seen.
Author: Roy Plotnick Publisher: Columbia University Press ISBN: 0231551312 Category : Science Languages : en Pages : 483
Book Description
Paleontology is one of the most visible yet most misunderstood fields of science. Children dream of becoming paleontologists when they grow up. Museum visitors flock to exhibits on dinosaurs and other prehistoric animals. The media reports on fossil discoveries and new clues to mass extinctions. Nonetheless, misconceptions abound: paleontologists are assumed only to be interested in dinosaurs, and they are all too often imagined as bearded white men in battered cowboy hats. Roy Plotnick provides a behind-the-scenes look at paleontology as it exists today in all its complexity. He explores the field’s aims, methods, and possibilities, with an emphasis on the compelling personal stories of the scientists who have made it a career. Paleontologists study the entire history of life on Earth; they do not only use hammers and chisels to unearth fossils but are just as likely to work with cutting-edge computing technology. Plotnick presents the big questions about life’s history that drive paleontological research and shows why knowledge of Earth’s past is essential to understanding present-day environmental crises. He introduces readers to the diverse group of people of all genders, races, and international backgrounds who make up the twenty-first-century paleontology community, foregrounding their perspectives and firsthand narratives. He also frankly discusses the many challenges that face the profession, with key takeaways for aspiring scientists. Candid and comprehensive, Explorers of Deep Time is essential reading for anyone curious about the everyday work of real-life paleontologists.
Author: Siegfried Zielinski Publisher: MIT Press ISBN: 026274032X Category : Technology & Engineering Languages : en Pages : 391
Book Description
A quest to find something new by excavating the "deep time" of media's development—not by simply looking at new media's historic forerunners, but by connecting models, machines, technologies, and accidents that have until now remained separated. Deep Time of the Media takes us on an archaeological quest into the hidden layers of media development—dynamic moments of intense activity in media design and construction that have been largely ignored in the historical-media archaeological record. Siegfried Zielinski argues that the history of the media does not proceed predictably from primitive tools to complex machinery; in Deep Time of the Media, he illuminates turning points of media history—fractures in the predictable—that help us see the new in the old. Drawing on original source materials, Zielinski explores the technology of devices for hearing and seeing through two thousand years of cultural and technological history. He discovers the contributions of "dreamers and modelers" of media worlds, from the ancient Greek philosopher Empedocles and natural philosophers of the Renaissance and Baroque periods to Russian avant-gardists of the early twentieth century. "Media are spaces of action for constructed attempts to connect what is separated," Zielinski writes. He describes models and machines that make this connection: including a theater of mirrors in sixteenth-century Naples, an automaton for musical composition created by the seventeenth-century Jesuit Athanasius Kircher, and the eighteenth-century electrical tele-writing machine of Joseph Mazzolari, among others. Uncovering these moments in the media-archaeological record, Zielinski says, brings us into a new relationship with present-day moments; these discoveries in the "deep time" media history shed light on today's media landscape and may help us map our expedition to the media future.
Author: M. J. S. Rudwick Publisher: University of Chicago Press ISBN: 9780226731049 Category : Art Languages : en Pages : 302
Book Description
In Scenes from Deep Time, Martin J. S. Rudwick traces the earliest attempts to reconstruct the past no one has ever seen. With over 100 stunning lithographs and engravings from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, many reproduced here for the first time since their original publication and accompanied by portions of the original explanatory texts, Rudwick argues that scientists and artists made earth history visually compelling as evidence from nature supplanted the biblical view of the distant past.
Author: Arthur McCalla Publisher: A&C Black ISBN: 9780826480026 Category : Religion Languages : en Pages : 254
Book Description
This book places the present Creationist opposition to the theory of evolution in historical context by setting out the ways in which, from the seventeenth century onwards, investigations of the history of the earth and of humanity have challenged the biblical views of chronology and human destiny, and the Christian responses to these challenges. The author's interest is not primarily directed to questions such as the epistemological status of scientific versus religious knowledge or the possibility of a Darwinian ethics, but rather to the problems, and various responses to the problems, raised in a particular historical period in the West for the Bible by the massive extension of the duration of geological time and human history.
Author: Lance Grande Publisher: University of Chicago Press ISBN: 0226922960 Category : Science Languages : en Pages : 438
Book Description
The landscape of southwestern Wyoming around the ghost town of Fossil is beautiful but harsh; a dry, high mountain desert with cool nights and long, cold winters inhabited by a sparse mountain desert community. But during the early Eocene, more than fifty million years ago, it was a subtropical lake, surrounded by volcanoes and forests and teeming with life. Buried within the sun-baked limestone is spectacular evidence of the lush vegetation and plentiful fauna of the ancient past, a transitional ecosystem giving us clues to how North America recovered from a great extinction event that wiped out dinosaurs and the majority of all species on the planet. Paleontologists have been conducting excavations at Fossil Butte for more than 150 years, and with The Lost World of Fossil Lake, one of the world’s leading experts on the fossils from this spectacular locality takes readers on a fascinating journey through the history of the discovery and exploration of the site. Deftly mixing incredible color photographs of the remarkable fossils uncovered at the site with an explanation of their evolutionary significance, Grande presents an unprecedented, comprehensive portrait of the site, its treasures, and what we’ve learned from them. Grande presents a broad range of fossilized organisms from Fossil Lake—from single-celled algae to palm trees to crocodiles—and together they make this long-extinct community come to life in all its diversity and splendor. A field guide and atlas round out the book, enabling readers to identify and classify the majority of the known fossils from the site. Lavishly produced in full color, The Lost World of Fossil Lake is a stunning reminder of the intellectual and physical beauty of scientific investigation—and a breathtaking window onto our planet’s long-lost past.
Author: Vincent Ialenti Publisher: MIT Press ISBN: 0262539268 Category : Technology & Engineering Languages : en Pages : 205
Book Description
A guide to long-term thinking: how to envision the far future of Earth. We live on a planet careening toward environmental collapse that will be largely brought about by our own actions. And yet we struggle to grasp the scale of the crisis, barely able to imagine the effects of climate change just ten years from now, let alone the multi-millennial timescales of Earth's past and future life span. In this book, Vincent Ialenti offers a guide for envisioning the planet's far future—to become, as he terms it, more skilled deep time reckoners. The challenge, he says, is to learn to inhabit a longer now. Ialenti takes on two overlapping crises: the Anthropocene, our current moment of human-caused environmental transformation; and the deflation of expertise—today's popular mockery and institutional erosion of expert authority. The second crisis, he argues, is worsening the effects of the first. Hearing out scientific experts who study a wider time span than a Facebook timeline is key to tackling our planet's emergency. Astrophysicists, geologists, historians, evolutionary biologists, climatologists, archaeologists, and others can teach us the art of long-termism. For a case study in long-term thinking, Ialenti turns to Finland's nuclear waste repository “Safety Case” experts. These scientists forecast far future glaciations, climate changes, earthquakes, and more, over the coming tens of thousands—or even hundreds of thousands or millions—of years. They are not pop culture “futurists” but data-driven, disciplined technical experts, using the power of patterns to construct detailed scenarios and quantitative models of the far future. This is the kind of time literacy we need if we are to survive the Anthropocene.
Author: M. J. S. Rudwick Publisher: University of Chicago Press ISBN: 0226731138 Category : Science Languages : en Pages : 733
Book Description
During a revolution of discovery in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, geologists reconstructed the immensely long history of the earth--and the relatively recent arrival of human life. Bursting the Limits of Time is a herculean effort by one of the world's foremost experts on the history of geology and paleontology to illuminate this scientific breakthrough that radically altered existing perceptions of a human's place in the universe as much as the theories of Copernicus and Darwin did. Rudwick examines here the ideas and practices of earth scientists throughout the Western world to show how the story of what we now call "deep time" was pieced together. He explores who was responsible for the discovery of the earth's history, refutes the concept of a rift between science and religion in dating the earth, and details how the study of the history of the earth helped define a new branch of science called geology. Bursting the Limits of Time is the first detailed account of this monumental phase in the history of science. "Bursting the Limits of Time is a massive work and is quite simply a masterpiece of science history. . . . The book should be obligatory for every geology and history of science library, and is a highly recommended companion for every civilized geologist who can carry an extra 2.4 kg in his rucksack."--Stephen Moorbath, Nature
Author: Martin J. S. Rudwick
Author: Martin J. S. Rudwick
Author: Roy Plotnick
Author: Siegfried Zielinski
Author: M. J. S. Rudwick
Author: Arthur McCalla
Author: Lance Grande
Author: Vincent Ialenti
Author: Helen Gordon
Author: M. J. S. Rudwick