Buy from our bookstore and 25% of the cover price will be given to a school of your choice to buy more books. *15% of eBooks.
Audiobooks by Professor John T. Sanders
Browse audiobooks by Professor John T. Sanders, listen to samples and when you're ready head over to Audiobooks.com where you can get 3 FREE audiobooks on us
Ancient and medieval awareness of electrical effects included lightning, electric fish, St. Elmo’s fire, the amber effect, and (esp. in early China) the lodestone (magnet). Plutarch explained the electric effect in terms of air displacement. The following chart shows a timeline of topics discussed in this set of audiotapes.
After Rome fell in the 5th century A.D., Europe endured a long drought of ideas. The Middle Ages were a time when spiritual, other-worldly concerns dominated intellectual life; study of the natural world was directed toward moral and religious truth. The works of Aristotle and Plato were almost entirely lost (and often purposefully destroyed) during the Dark Ages (455 - 1000 A.D.). The library and museum at Alexandria, a major repository of learning, was destroyed. Only in the Muslim world of Arabia and Spain, and in some Christian monasteries, was worldly learning preserved to any extent at all. Influences from China, India, and Persia shaped many of the new scientific developments that did occur. Alchemists, the forerunners of modern chemists, were influenced by Neoplatonist views about the close relationship between appearance and reality; they sought to change metals by changing their color. Many natural events were mysterious; magic or superstition were common, and there was a great overlap between the natural and the supernatural. After 1000 A.D., translations of great works were increasingly available, and craft associations evolved into universities. Most educated people were clergy, and they worked to justify their faith with the new learning. With the development of printing in 1452 and the increasing dispersion of knowledge, a foundation was being laid for a scientific breakthrough - in the Renaissance.
In 1905, Albert Einstein published his Special Theory of Relativity, followed by the General Theory of Relativity in 1916. He firmly established (1) the idea that all judgement about motion is a matter of perspective; (2) that energy and mass are interrelated (E=mc2); and (3) that nothing can move faster than the speed of light (which does not vary). Einstein's theory of the space - time continuum was dramatically confirmed in a 1919 experiment during a solar eclipse. "Relativity" is a concept rooted in the tension between appearance and reality, and it reaches far back in history. Heraclitus argued that only change is real; Parmenides argued that change is impossible, and his follower Zeno invented paradoxes illustrating many of the problems in concepts like space, time, and infinity. Protagoras even argued that there is no single, correct view of reality, but that reality for any person is precisely as it seems to that person. In his words, "Man is the measure of all things." Plato used mathematical reasoning to discern reality from mere appearance, and modern natural science emerged from centuries of effort to acquire objective knowledge. The greatest scientists of the Renaissance and Enlightenment -- including Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, and Newton -- believed that some real or absolute space and time are independent of the senses. But Immanuel Kant, J.C. Maxwell, Ernest Mach and Henri Poincare chipped away at this idea in the 18th and 19th centuries.
Science is a way of knowing that's characterized by the rules of logic and the methods of experiment. But the conflict between logic and experiment has created a long-standing tension in scientific understanding. The classical period and the Middle Ages favored rationalism; most thinkers began with general, self-evident truths, using deductive reasoning to draw more specific logical conclusions. Empiricism begins with experimental or sensory experience; a bottom-up process of inductive reasoning produces more general hypotheses and theories. David Hume emphasized the role of perception in knowing things, but he argued that past experience cannot justify firm conclusions about the future. Immanuel Kant emphasized the role of the mind in all observation, showing that everything we see is "theory laden;" Auguste Comte and the "positivists" insisted that what is real is observable. Karl Popper emphasized the role of refutation in weeding out bad scientific theories, and Thomas Kuhn suggested that scientific progress occurs in a succession of explanatory "paradigms." Kuhn, Feyerabend, and others have shown the difficulties of distinguishing between experiment and theory, or fact and interpretation. Science has shown that absolute truth is elusive. Yet when science is judged by its usefulness, it is one of the most spectacular achievements of human kind. Science is a never-ending cycle of questions and answers-a perpetual process of discovery.
