Newton: A Very Short Introduction
Newton: A Very Short Introduction
... back again, this time revealing that he had supposed that gravity was always inversely proportional to the square of the distance from the centre of attraction. What now remained, he said, was ... 1687 and dealt with the actual system of the world. From basic principles, and from astronomical and physical data, Newton demonstrated that the earth was flattened at the poles (i.e. was an oblate s...
Ngày tải lên: 12/02/2014, 09:58
Economics: A Very Short Introduction
... parents can afford to be egalitarian. In contrast, Becky’s household can always afford enough food. Her parents allocate food equally every day – again, allowing for differences in nutritional ... due care has been taken by insurees against bad outcomes (protection against moral hazard). By being able to take advantage of the Law of Large Numbers, markets and the government, taken together, a...
Ngày tải lên: 10/01/2014, 18:21
Game theory: A very short introduction
... Von Neumann’s toy model abstracts all such complications away. Alice and Bob are each dealt a number between 0 and 1. Both aim to maximize their average dollar earnings on the assumption that 90 Information all ... in launching an angry attack on Alice after she has treated him unfairly. His behaviour might then easily be dismissed as irrational by observers who fail to notice that he isn’t...
Ngày tải lên: 10/01/2014, 18:23
Global catastrophes: A very short introduction
... the planet, sending up a gigantic plume of gas and debris and blasting outwards a rapidly expanding shock wave. As fragment after fragment hammered into the planet, spectacular images were gathered ... waves, earthquakes, tsunamis, and wildfires. Many urban centres in Europe, Africa, and Asia appear to have collapsed almost simultaneously around 2350 bc, and records abound of flood, fire, qu...
Ngày tải lên: 11/01/2014, 18:43
Photography: a very short introduction
... is an index of a speaker; writing of a hand employing a pen or moving over a keyboard; traffic signs of both a fabricator and an act of planning. What is particular, and peculiar, about photographs is ... a distinction between actual and virtual phenomena.) Assuming a good, flat mirror with a clean surface, there are three factors that enable a beholder to determine that what...
Ngày tải lên: 11/01/2014, 18:44
Nuclear weapons: A very short introduction
... is moral; offense is immoral.’ Ironically, three and a half decades later, James M. Lindsay and Michael E. O’Hanlon argued a national security policy that deliberately leaves the American people ... Watkins concluded, to have a long-range programme to ‘develop systems that would defeat a missile attack’. Reagan gravitated to Watkins’s missile defence idea as a way to alleviate...
Ngày tải lên: 11/01/2014, 18:44
The meaning of life: A very short introduction
... gods and beasts. Yet Aristotelian man, as Alasdair MacIntyre has observed, is a stranger to love. 27 The assumption that the meaning of life is primarily an individual affair is still alive and ... Nicomachean Ethics, available in Penguin Classics in an edition by Jonathan Barnes (Harmondsworth, 1976). Jonathan Barnes has also published a useful introduction to Aristotle in the V...
Ngày tải lên: 11/01/2014, 18:45