Scimat (Science Matters) is the new multidiscipline that deals with the science of humans. It aims to raise the scientific level of the humanities by encouraging interaction between humanists and natural scientists. This book arises from a very special conjunction between different scientists meeting together for the VII International Conference on Science Matters at - NOVA School of Business and Economics - in Carcavelos, Portugal, in October 2019. This book has been organized in three pa...

Scimat (Science Matters) is the new multidiscipline that deals with the science of humans. It aims to raise the scientific level of the humanities by encouraging interaction between humanists and natural scientists. This book Interdisciplinarity and General Education in the 21st Century derives from the fifth international scimat conference of the same title, held in Cascais, Portugal, in October 2015, at Muchaxo Hotel, one of the most ancient icons of the charming Atlantic Coast. A great ...

Scimat (Science Matters) is the new multidiscipline that deals with the science of humans. It aims to raise the scientific level of the humanities by encouraging interaction between humanists and natural scientists. This book arises from a very special conjunction between several different scientists meeting together for the tenth anniversary of the Science Matters Conferences at Cascais Cultural Center in October 2017. This volume which contains 8 chapters written by 9 expert humanists an...

Many aspects of research activity in science are opaque to outsiders and this opacity infects how connections are made between science and other disciplines. The aim of Culture, Curiosity and Communication in Scientific Discovery is to try to shine a light through the mist of scientific research by way of examples taken from the sciences, social sciences and the humanities.The book maintains that the foundations of science are built on sand because theories come and go and...

First published in 1996, Science as a Questioning Process evaluates scientific theories through from Darwinian evolution to relativity, and from quantum theory to cosmology. It offers an examination of these theories, in terms of a compromise between resolvable empirical questions, and theoretical questions left unresolved. The book asks questions that deal with both intellectual and public concern about what science tells us, and how reliable it is. Through this novel perspective...

If we are to believe many modern commentators, science has squeezed God into a corner, killed and then buried him with its all-embracing explanations. Atheism, we are told, is the only intellectually tenable position, and any attempt to reintroduce God is likely to impede the progress of science.In this stimulating and thought-provoking book, John Lennox invites us to consider such claims very carefully.This book evaluates the evidence of modern science in ...

What is science? Is there a real difference between science and myth? Is science objective? Can science explain everything? This Very Short Introduction provides a concise overview of the main themes of contemporary philosophy of science. Beginning with a short history of science to set the scene, Samir Okasha goes on to investigate the nature of scientific reasoning, scientific explanation, revolutions in science, and theories such as realism and anti-realism. He also looks at philosophic...

Bestselling author and astrophysicist Mario Livio examines the lives and theories of history’s greatest mathematicians to ask how—if mathematics is an abstract construction of the human mind—it can so perfectly explain the physical world.Nobel Laureate Eugene Wigner once wondered about “the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics” in the formulation of the laws of nature. Is God a Mathematician? investigates why mathematics is as powerful as it is. From ...

A radical new explanation of how life and consciousness emerge from physics and chemistry.As physicists work toward completing a theory of the universe and biologists unravel the molecular complexity of life, a glaring incompleteness in this scientific vision becomes apparent. The "Theory of Everything" that appears to be emerging includes everything but us: the feelings, meanings, consciousness, and purposes that make us (and many of our animal cousins) what we are. These most imm...

Alan Turing's 1936 paper On Computable Numbers, introducing the Turing machine, was a landmark of twentieth-century thought. It settled a deep problem in the foundations of mathematics, and provided the principle of the post-war electronic computer. It also supplied a new approach to the philosophy of the mind.Influenced by his crucial codebreaking work in the Second World War, and by practical pioneering of the first electronic computers, Turing argued that all the operations of t...

Cosmology is in crisis. The more we discover, the more puzzling the universe appears to be. How and why are the laws of nature what they are? A philosopher and a physicist, world-renowned for their radical ideas in their fields, argue for a revolution. To keep cosmology scientific, we must replace the old view in which the universe is governed by immutable laws by a new one in which laws evolve. Then we can hope to explain them. The revolution that Roberto Mangabeira Unger and Lee Smolin p...

Adrian Bardon's A Brief History of the Philosophy of Time is a short introduction to the history, philosophy, and science of the study of time-from the pre-Socratic philosophers through Einstein and beyond. A Brief History of the Philosophy of Time covers subjects such as time and change, the experience of time, physical and metaphysical approaches to the nature of time, the direction of time, time travel, time and freedom of the will, and scientific and philosophical approaches to eternit...