Product Description: For decades, experts and the public have been at odds over the nature and magnitude of risks and how they should be mitigated through policy. Experts argue that the fears of the public are irrational, and that public policy should be based on sound science...read more

Product Description: The contentious history of the idea of the black hole—the most fascinating and bizarre celestial object in the heavens For more than half a century, physicists and astronomers engaged in heated dispute over the possibility of black holes in the universe...read more

Product Description: Science occupies an ambiguous space in contemporary society. Scientific research is championed in relation to tackling environmental issues and diseases such as cancer and dementia, and science has made important contributions to today’s knowledge economies and knowledge societies...read more

Worries about scientific objectivity seem never-ending. Social critics and philosophers of science have argued that invocations of objectivity are often little more than attempts to boost the status of a claim, while calls for value neutrality may be used to suppress otherwise valid dissenting positions. Objectivity is used sometimes to advance democratic agendas, at other times to block them; sometimes for increasing the growth of knowledge, at others to resist it. Sandra Harding is not ready to throw out objectivity quite yet. For all of its problems, she contends that objectivity is too powerful a concept simply to abandon. In Objectivity and Diversity, Harding calls for a science that is both more epistemically adequate and socially just, a science that would ask: How are the lives of the most economically and politically vulnerable groups affected by a particular piece of research? Do they have a say in whether and how the research is done? Should empirically reliable systems of indigenous knowledge count as "real science"? Ultimately, Harding argues for a shift from the ideal of a neutral, disinterested science to one that prizes fairness and responsibility.

Product Description: In Scientific Controversies, Dominque Raynaud shows how organized debates in the sciences help us establish or verify our knowledge of the world. If debates focus on form, scientific controversies are akin to public debates that can be understood within the framework of theories of conflict...read more

Product Description: Debunks cherished theories of mainstream consensus and reveals the deeper mysteries of the science of the unseen • Reveals a new “Theory of Everything” to replace the standard model and complete our knowledge of Earth Science, anthropology, psychology, and spirituality • Explains the failings of the Big Bang, evolution, ice age theory, and global warming • Shows how the Freudian and Jungian theories of the unconscious have grossly misrepresented the spirit of man and the psyche of humanity What if science and society’s most darling theories, taught as fact, were 100% wrong? What if the anomalies that disprove these theories were covered up and distorted and any serious challenges brushed off as lunacy, hysteria, junk science, and dissension? In this primer in deprogramming, Susan B...read more

Product Description: Does science have limits? Where does order come from? Can we understand consciousness? Written by Nobel Laureate Leon N. Cooper, this book places pressing scientific questions in the broader context of how they relate to human experience...read more

Product Description: Bruno Latour stirs things up. Latour began as a lover of science and technology, co-founder of actor-network theory, and philosopher of a modernity that had "never been modern." In the meantime he is regarded not just as one of the most intelligent and also popular exponents of science studies but also as a major innovator of the social sciences, an exemplary wanderer who walks the line between the sciences and the humanities...read more

Product Description: This collection explores whether and how religious and secular worldviews and political ideologies held by scientists, citizens, decision-makers and politicians influence science as practiced and understood today. Contributors explore the social and scientific repercussions of 'customizing' science to fit the needs and interests of various groups...read more

Product Description: Over the past thirty years, a new systemic conception of life has emerged at the forefront of science. New emphasis has been given to complexity, networks, and patterns of organisation, leading to a novel kind of 'systemic' thinking...read more

Product Description: "This work explores the complex relationship between science and politics. More specifically, it focuses on the problem of scientism. Scientism is a deformation of science, which unnecessarily restricts the scope of scientific inquiry by placing a dogmatic faith in the method of the natural sciences...read more