Author : Ken McNamara
Publisher :
Page : 368 pages
File Size : 21,74 MB
Release : 1997
Category : Religion
ISBN :
How did evolution produce specific characteristics, such as the feet of amphibians, or the eye and brain that allow us to read these words? Museum curator Kenneth McNamara delves into the fascinating field of heterochrony to show the errant results when a normal pattern of embryological development is gently nudged off-course. 60 illustrations.
Author : Etienne Klein
Publisher : Thunder's Mouth Press
Page : 191 pages
File Size : 48,92 MB
Release : 2005
Category : Science
ISBN : 9781560257080
A lyrical parsing of the enigmatic nature of time profiles it as a constant factor that cannot be experienced through the senses and must be examined through such "side effects" as duration, memory, and movement, in an account that evaluates time as considered by Galileo, Einstein, and modern antimatter and superstring physicists.
Author : Eviatar Zerubavel
Publisher : University of Chicago Press
Page : 194 pages
File Size : 37,48 MB
Release : 2012-06-12
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 0226924904
The pioneering sociologist and author of The Seven Day Circle continues his analysis of time with this fascinating look at history as social construct. Who were the first people to inhabit North America? Does the West Bank belong to the Arabs or the Jews? Why are racists so obsessed with origins? Is a seventh cousin still a cousin? Why do some societies name their children after dead ancestors? As Eviatar Zerubavel demonstrates in Time Maps, we cannot answer burning questions such as these without a deeper understanding of how we envision the past. In a pioneering attempt to map the structure of collective memory, Zerubavel considers the cognitive patterns we use to organize the past and the social grammar of conflicting interpretations of history. Drawing on fascinating examples that range from Hiroshima to the Holocaust, and from ancient Egypt to the former Yugoslavia, Zerubavel shows how we construct historical origins; how we tie discontinuous events together into stories; how we link families and entire nations through genealogies; and how we separate distinct historical periods from one another through watersheds, such as the invention of fire or the fall of the Berlin Wall. "Time Maps extends beyond all of the old clichés about linear, circular, and spiral patterns of historical process and provides us with models of the actual legends used to map history…brilliant and elegant."-Hayden White, University of California, Santa Cruz
Author : Michael McGillen
Publisher : Cornell University Press
Page : 354 pages
File Size : 16,93 MB
Release : 2023-12-15
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 1501772848
Shapes of Time explores how concepts of time and history were spatialized in early twentieth-century German thought. Michael McGillen locates efforts in German modernism to conceive of alternative shapes of time—beyond those of historicism and nineteenth-century philosophies of history—at the boundary between secular and theological discourses. By analyzing canonical works of German modernism—those of Karl Barth, Franz Rosenzweig, Siegfried Kracauer, and Robert Musil—he identifies the ways in which spatial imagery and metaphors were employed to both separate the end of history from a narrative framework and to map the liminal relation between history and eschatology. Drawing on theories and practices as disparate as constructivism, non-Euclidean geometry, photography, and urban architecture, Shapes of Time presents original connections between modernism, theology, and mathematics as played out within the canon of twentieth-century German letters. Concepts of temporal and spatial form, McGillen contends, contribute to the understanding not only of modernist literature but also of larger theoretical concerns within modern cultural and intellectual history.
Author : Roseanne Greenfield Thong
Publisher : Chronicle Books
Page : 38 pages
File Size : 14,27 MB
Release : 2014-02-25
Category : Juvenile Fiction
ISBN : 1452139334
In this lively picture book, children discover a world of shapes all around them: rectangles are ice-cream carts and stone metates, triangles are slices of watermelon and quesadillas. Many of the featured objects are Latino in origin, and all are universal in appeal. With rich, boisterous illustrations, a fun-to-read rhyming text, and an informative glossary, this playful concept book will reinforce the shapes found in every child's day! Plus, this is the fixed format version, which will look almost identical to the print version. Additionally for devices that support audio, this ebook includes a read-along setting.
Author : Sonia Front
Publisher :
Page : 0 pages
File Size : 46,1 MB
Release : 2015
Category : English fiction
ISBN : 9781443880299
This book addresses the notion of time and temporality and its various conceptualizations in the theories of the new physics, utilized as a thematic and formal framework in the British novel of the twenty-first century. As the Newtonian conception of reality does not provide a reliable framework within which to situate human experience and generate meaning, fiction writers have recognized quantum mechanics as a potent source from which to draw in search of new metaphors. The quantum has become a part of the understanding of reality, and its concepts and assumptions have been absorbed into the textual structure and content of literary fiction. Shapes of Time in British Twenty-First Century Quantum Fiction examines human temporality as mediated by the timeshapes imagined within the context of the new physics, and explores the philosophical implications for human temporality and identity of situating an individual within the realm of physical time. Its chapters deal with various concepts of the new physics connected with temporality, and their appropriation in a selected novel: parallel universes in Andrew Crumeyâ (TM)s Sputnik Caledonia (2008), eternal recurrence and PoincarÃ(c)â (TM)s theorem in David Mitchellâ (TM)s Cloud Atlas (2004), chaos theory in Samantha Harveyâ (TM)s The Wilderness (2009), and the end of time in Scarlett Thomasâ (TM)s The End of Mr. Y (2006). Each of them corresponds to a different conceptual shape of time: tree, concertina, spiral and snapshot, respectively, which is enacted on the formal level. Analyzing the new time constructs in a narrative, this book thus uncovers passages between scientific and humanistic standpoints, and reveals quantum fiction to be an effective tool for visualizing the subjective non-homogenous experience of private time.
Author : Sonia Front
Publisher : Cambridge Scholars Publishing
Page : 180 pages
File Size : 40,40 MB
Release : 2015-09-04
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 1443882038
This book addresses the notion of time and temporality and its various conceptualizations in the theories of the new physics, utilized as a thematic and formal framework in the British novel of the twenty-first century. As the Newtonian conception of reality does not provide a reliable framework within which to situate human experience and generate meaning, fiction writers have recognized quantum mechanics as a potent source from which to draw in search of new metaphors. The quantum has become a part of the understanding of reality, and its concepts and assumptions have been absorbed into the textual structure and content of literary fiction. Shapes of Time in British Twenty-First Century Quantum Fiction examines human temporality as mediated by the timeshapes imagined within the context of the new physics, and explores the philosophical implications for human temporality and identity of situating an individual within the realm of physical time. Its chapters deal with various concepts of the new physics connected with temporality, and their appropriation in a selected novel: parallel universes in Andrew Crumey’s Sputnik Caledonia (2008), eternal recurrence and Poincaré’s theorem in David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas (2004), chaos theory in Samantha Harvey’s The Wilderness (2009), and the end of time in Scarlett Thomas’s The End of Mr. Y (2006). Each of them corresponds to a different conceptual shape of time: tree, concertina, spiral and snapshot, respectively, which is enacted on the formal level. Analyzing the new time constructs in a narrative, this book thus uncovers passages between scientific and humanistic standpoints, and reveals quantum fiction to be an effective tool for visualizing the subjective non-homogenous experience of private time.
Author : Martin Concoyle Ph.D.
Publisher : Trafford Publishing
Page : 401 pages
File Size : 39,15 MB
Release : 2014-01-16
Category : Education
ISBN : 1490723722
This book is an introduction to the simple math patterns that can be used to describe fundamental, stable spectral-orbital physical systems (represented as discrete hyperbolic shapes, i.e., hyperbolic space-forms), the containment set has many dimensions, and these dimensions possess macroscopic geometric properties (where hyperbolic metric-space subspaces are modeled to be discrete hyperbolic shapes). Thus, it is a description that transcends the idea of materialism (i.e., it is higher-dimensional so that the higher dimensions are not small), and it is a math context can also be used to model a life-form as a unified, high-dimension, geometric construct that generates its own energy and which has a natural structure for memory where this construct is made in relation to the main property of the description being, in fact, the spectral properties of both (1) material systems and of (2) the metric-spaces, which contain the material systems where material is simply a lower dimension metric-space and where both material-components and metric-spaces are in resonance with (and define) the containing space.
Author : Peter C. Hodgson
Publisher : Oxford University Press
Page : pages
File Size : 15,63 MB
Release : 2012-06-07
Category : Philosophy
ISBN : 0191626597
Peter C. Hodgson explores Hegel's bold vision of history as the progress of the consciousness of freedom. Following an introductory chapter on the textual sources, the key categories, and the modes of writing history that Hegel distinguishes, Hodgson presents a new interpretation of Hegel's conception of freedom. Freedom is not simply a human production, but takes shape through the interweaving of the divine idea and human passions, and such freedom defines the purpose of historical events in the midst of apparent chaos. Freedom is also a process that unfolds through stages of historical/cultural development and is oriented to an end that occurs within history (the 'kingdom of freedom'). The purpose and the process of history are tragic, however, because history is also a 'slaughterhouse' that shatters even the finest human creations and requires a constant rebuilding. Hegel's God is not a supreme being or 'large entity' but the 'true infinite' that encompasses the finite. History manifests the rule of God ('providence'), and it functions as the justification of God ('theodicy'). But the God who rules in and is justified by history is a crucified God who takes the suffering, anguish, and evil of the world into and upon godself, accomplishing reconciliation in the midst of ongoing estrangement and inescapable death. Shapes of Freedom addresses these themes in the context of present-day questions about what they mean and whether they still have validity.
Author : M. Joshua Mozersky
Publisher : OUP Oxford
Page : 208 pages
File Size : 21,20 MB
Release : 2015-01-29
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN : 0191028002
This book brings together, in a novel way, an account of the structure of time with an account of our language and thought about time. Joshua Mozersky argues that it is possible to reconcile the human experience of time, which is centred on the present, with the objective conception of time, according to which all moments are intrinsically alike. He defends a temporally centreless ontology along with a tenseless semantics that is compatible with - and indeed helps to explain the need for - tensed language and thought. This theory of time also, it is argued, helps to elucidate the nature of change and temporal passage, neither of which need be denied nor relegated to the realm of subjective experience only. The book addresses a variety of topics including whether the past and future are real; whether temporal passage is a genuine phenomenon or merely a subjective illusion; how the asymmetry of time is to be understood; the nature of representation; how something can change its properties yet retain its identity; and whether objects are three-dimensional or four-dimensional. It is a wide-ranging examination of recent issues in metaphysics, philosophy of language and the philosophy of science and presents a compelling picture of the relationship of human beings to the spatiotemporal world.
