James Evans
Contributor
BIOGRAPHY
Professor of Physics and Director of Program for Science, Technology, and Society, University of Puget Sound, Tacoma, Washington. Author of The History and Practice of Ancient Astronomy; coeditor of Quantum Mechanics at the Crossroads.
Primary Contributions (4)
Astronomy, science that encompasses the study of all extraterrestrial objects and phenomena. Until the invention of the telescope and the discovery of the laws of motion and gravity in the 17th century, astronomy was primarily concerned with noting and predicting the positions of the Sun, Moon, and…
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Publications (2)
Quantum Mechanics at the Crossroads New Perspectives from History, Philosophy and Physics (2007)
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Quantum mechanics is a beautiful, strange and successful theory that originated in the 1920s. The theory, which Niels Bohr regarded as finished and complete, has in the last few decades rapidly developed in unexpected directions. An intense new focus on the stranger aspects of the theory, including entanglement and nonlocality, has resulted in new perceptions of the foundations of quantum mechanics, as well as surprising new exploitations of quantum phenomena. Historians and philosophers of science...
The History and Practice of Ancient Astronomy (October 1998)
The History and Practice of Ancient Astronomy combines new scholarship with hands-on science to bring readers into direct contact with the work of ancient astronomers. While tracing ideas from ancient Babylon to sixteenth-century Europe, the book places its greatest emphasis on the Greek period, when astronomers developed the geometric and philosophical ideas that have determined the subsequent character of Western astronomy. The author approaches this history through the concrete details of ancient...
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