Videnskabens og teknologiens påvirkning af samfundet

**A FINANCIAL TIMES BOOK OF THE YEAR 2022**'Powerful... a clarion call for change', New Statesman'Poetic and philosophical at times, intimate and expansive at others', Daily TelegraphHow much light is too much light? The Darkness Manifesto urges us to cherish natural darkness for the sake of the environment, our own wellbeing, and all life on earth.The world's flora and fauna have evolved to operate in the natural cycle of day and night. But constant illumination has made light pollution a major issue. From space, our planet glows brightly, 24/7. By extending our day, we have forced out the inhabitants of the night and disrupted the circadian rhythms necessary to sustain all living things. Our cities' streetlamps and neon signs are altering entire ecosystems.Johan Eklöf encourages us to appreciate natural darkness and its unique benefits. He also writes passionately about the domino effect of damage we inflict by keeping the lights on: insects failing to reproduce; birds blinded and bewildered; bats starving as they wait in vain for insects that only come out in the dark. And humans can find that our hormones, weight and mental well-being are all impacted.Eye-opening and ultimately encouraging, The Darkness Manifesto offers simple steps that can benefit ourselves and the planet.The light bulb - long the symbol of progress - needs to be turned off. To ensure a bright future, we must embrace the darkness

Provides the foundations of a genuine unified field theory.

Our computers and mobile devices do wonderful things for us. But they also impose a burden, making it harder for us to focus, do our best work, build strong relationships, and find the depth and fulfillment we crave. How to solve this problem? Hamlet's BlackBerry argues that we just need a new way of thinking, an everyday philosophy for life with screens. William Powers sets out to solve what he calls the conundrum of connectedness. Reaching into the past?using his own life as laboratory and object lesson?he draws on some of history's most brilliant thinkers, from Plato to Shakespeare to Thoreau, to demonstrate that digital connectedness serves us best when it's balanced by its opposite, disconnectedness. Lively, original, and entertaining, Hamlet's BlackBerry will challenge you to rethink your digital life.

In his most powerful book to date, award-winning author TimothyFerris makes a passionate case for scienceas the inspiration behind the rise of liberalismand democracy. Ferris showshow science was integral to the AmericanRevolution but misinterpreted inthe French Revolution; reflects on thehistory of liberalism, stressing its widelyunderestimated and mutually beneficialrelationship with science; and surveysthe forces that have opposed scienceand liberalism--from communism andfascism to postmodernism and Islamicfundamentalism. A sweeping intellectualhistory, The Science of Liberty is a stunninglyoriginal work that transcends theantiquated concepts of left and right.

Few issues have revealed deeper divisions in our society than the debate between creationism and evolution, between religion and science. Yet from the fray, Reverend Michael Dowd has emerged as a reconciler, finding faith strengthened by the power of reason. With evidence from contemporary astrophysics, geology, biology, anthropology, and evolutionary psychology, Thank God for Evolution lays out a compelling argument for how religion and science can be mutually enriching forces in our lives. Praised by Nobel laureates in the scientific community and religious leaders alike, Thank God for Evolution will expand the horizon of what is possible for self, for relationships, and for our world.

A bold and vital book that asks and answers the most urgent question of today: What Would Google Do? In a book that's one part prophecy, one part thought experiment, one part manifesto, and one part survival manual, internet impresario and blogging pioneer Jeff Jarvis reverse-engineers Google?the fastest-growing company in history?to discover forty clear and straightforward rules to manage and live by. At the same time, he illuminates the new worldview of the internet generation: how it challenges and destroys, but also opens up vast new opportunities. His findings are counterintuitive, imaginative, practical, and above all visionary, giving readers a glimpse of how everyone and everything?from corporations to governments, nations to individuals?must evolve in the Google era.Along the way, he looks under the hood of a car designed by its drivers, ponders a worldwide university where the students design their curriculum, envisions an airline fueled by a social network, imagines the open-source restaurant, and examines a series of industries and institutions that will soon benefit from this book's central question. The result is an astonishing, mind-opening book that, in the end, is not about Google. It's about you.

Would your body work better with some artificial parts? Will you live longer, perhaps a lot longer, than you now expect? The next decade promises another qualitative shift in the way we view technology, as once purely fictional concepts-robots, cyborg parts, and the many variations in between-become part of reality. Gregory Benford and Elisabeth Malartre's Beyond Human treats the landscape of human self-change and robotic development as poles of the same phenomenon. Can we go too far in making ourselves machine-like or making machines resemble us? Once made, what will such creatures think about us? These questions will arise in myriad ways in the next few decades, as we press against boundaries that a short while ago existed only in works of the imagination. Written in a lively and provocative style, this is a readable book about the accumulation of small scientific advances that add up to something large and challenging.

The wonders of progress are all around us, so commonplace that we usually take them for granted. Moved by curiosity and compassion, we have built a world that satisfies many deep human needs, especially the desire not to stand so naked in the face of nature's many malignancies. To cancer, we say chemotherapy; to infertility, we say in vitro; to depression, we say Prozac. Without technology, man is impotent, and only a fool would romanticize the age when mothers and children died regularly in childbirth, when keeping warm and staying fed were life's central struggles, and when the visible afflictions of the body had no other explanation except the hatred of the gods. Of modern progress, there is much to be proud.

What should we teach our children about where we come from?Is evolution a lie or good science?Is it incompatible with faith?Have scientists really detected evidence of a creator in nature?From bestselling, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Edward Humes comes a dramatic story of faith, science, and courage unlike any since the famous Scopes Monkey Trial. Monkey Girl takes you behind the scenes of the recent war on evolution in Dover, Pennsylvania, when the town's school board decision to confront the controversy head-on thrust its students, then the entire community, onto the front lines of America's culture wars. Told from the perspectives of all sides of the battle, it is a riveting true story about an epic court case on the teaching of "intelligent design," and what happens when science and religion collide.

The New York Times bestseller - a "crystal-clear, constantly engaging" (Jared Diamond) exploration of the role that religious belief plays in our lives and our interactionsFor all the thousands of books that have been written about religion, few until this one have attempted to examine it scientifically: to ask why-and how-it has shaped so many lives so strongly. Is religion a product of blind evolutionary instinct or rational choice? Is it truly the best way to live a moral life? Ranging through biology, history, and psychology, Daniel C. Dennett charts religion's evolution from "wild" folk belief to "domesticated" dogma. Not an antireligious screed but an unblinking look beneath the veil of orthodoxy, Breaking the Spell will be read and debated by believers and skeptics alike.

NEW SCIENCE / EARTH CHANGESMany ancient myths from around the world tell of catastrophic destruction by fire and flood. These ubiquitous legends are so extreme that they are -often dismissed as imaginative exaggerations. In Earth Under Fire, Paul LaViolette connects these "myths" to recent scientific findings in astronomy, geology, and archaeology to reconstruct the details of prehistoric global -disasters and to explain how similar tragedies could recur in the near future. Compelled by his decryption of an ancient warning hidden in zodiac constellation lore, LaViolette worked with information from many scientific sources, including astronomical observations, polar ice core measurements, and other geological data, to confirm that our Galaxy's core exploded near the end of the last ice age. This explosion unleashed a barrage of cosmic rays and enveloped the solar system in a dense nebula, which led to periods of persistent darkness, frigid cold, severe solar storms, searing heat, and mountainous floods that plagued mankind for many generations. Linking his scientific findings to details preserved in the myths and monuments of ancient civilizations, he demonstrates how past civilizations accurately recorded the causes of these cataclysmic events, knowledge of which may be crucial for the human race to survive the next catastrophic superwave cycle. This information reveals the intelligence and ingenuity of our ancestors who, when faced with extinction, found the means to warn us that the apocalypse that destroyed them could occur once again. PAUL A. LAVIOLETTE, PH.D., is president of the Starburst Foundation, an interdisciplinary research institute, and holds degrees in both systems science and physics. The author of Genesis of the Cosmos and Subquantum Kinetics, he lives in New York.

This scarce antiquarian book is a facsimile reprint of the original. Due to its age, it may contain imperfections such as marks, notations, marginalia and flawed pages. Because we believe this work is culturally important, we have made it available as part of our commitment for protecting, preserving, and promoting the world's literature in affordable, high quality, modern editions that are true to the original work.

From Brian Greene, one of the world's leading physicists and author of the Pulitzer Prize finalist The Elegant Universe, comes a grand tour of the universe that makes us look at reality in a completely different way.Space and time form the very fabric of the cosmos. Yet they remain among the most mysterious of concepts. Is space an entity? Why does time have a direction? Could the universe exist without space and time? Can we travel to the past? Greene has set himself a daunting task: to explain non-intuitive, mathematical concepts like String Theory, the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, and Inflationary Cosmology with analogies drawn from common experience. From Newton's unchanging realm in which space and time are absolute, to Einstein's fluid conception of spacetime, to quantum mechanics' entangled arena where vastly distant objects can instantaneously coordinate their behavior, Greene takes us all, regardless of our scientific backgrounds, on an irresistible and revelatory journey to the new layers of reality that modern physics has discovered lying just beneath the surface of our everyday world.

Why have we humans always longed to connect with something larger than ourselves? Even today in our technologically advanced age, more than seventy percent of Americans claim to believe in God. Why, in short, won't God go away? In this groundbreaking new book, researchers Andrew Newberg and Eugene d'Aquili offer an explanation that is at once profoundly simple and scientifically precise: The religious impulse is rooted in the biology of the brain.In Why God Won't Go Away, Newberg and d'Aquili document their pioneering explorations in the field of neurotheology, an emerging discipline dedicated to understanding the complex relationship between spirituality and the brain. Blending cutting-edge science with illuminating insights into the nature of consciousness and spirituality, they bridge faith and reason, mysticism and empirical data. The neurological basis of how the brain identifies the "real” is nothing short of miraculous. This fascinating, eye-opening book dares to explore both the miracle and the biology of our enduring relationship with God.

In "Life Is a Miracle", the devotion of science to the quantitative and reductionist world is measured against the mysterious, qualitative suggestions of religion and art. Berry sees life as the collision of these separate forces, but without all three in the mix people are left at sea in the world.

From all sides, we hear that computer technology, with its undeniable power to disseminate information and connect individuals, holds enormous potential for a reinvigoration of political life. But will the Internet really spark a democratic revolution? And will the changes it brings be so profound that past political thought will be of little use in helping us to understand them? In Prometheus Wired, Darin Barney debunks claims that a networked society will provide the infrastructure for a political revolution and shows that the resources we need for understanding and making sound judgments about this new technology are surprisingly close at hand. By looking to thinkers who grappled with the relationship of society and technology, such as Plato, Aristotle, Marx, and Heidegger, Barney critically examines such assertions about the character of digital networks. Along the way, Barney offers an eye-opening history of digital networks and then explores a wide range of contemporary issues, such as electronic commerce, telecommuting, privacy, virtual community, digital surveillance, and the possibility of sovereign governance in an age of global networks. Ultimately, Barney argues that instead of placing power back in the hands of the public, a networked economy seems to exacerbate the worst features of industrial capitalism, and, in terms of the surveillance and control it exerts, reduces our political freedom. Of vital interest to politicians, communicators, and anyone concerned about the future of democracy in the digital age, Prometheus Wired adds a provocative new voice to the debate swirling around "the Net" and the ways in which it will, or will not, change our political lives.

Six contributors here debate the relative merits of four distinct conceptions of the relationship between Christianity and science today. Views range from a strict creationist posture to full-fledged partnership. Edited by Richard F. Carlson.

Develops a general theory of prediction that encompasses its fundamental principles, methodology, and practice and gives an overview of its promises and problems.

Recent advances in a variety of scientific disciplines have revealed the limitations of the Newtonian-Cartesian model of the universe. One of the interesting aspects of this development is the increasing convergence of science and the "perennial philosophy." The new research has led to a critical revaluation of ancient spiritual systems long ignored or rejected because of their assumed incompatibility with science.Here are Swami Muktananda on the mind. Swami Prajnananda on Karma. Swami Kripananda on the Kundalini. Ajit Mookerjee on the Kundalini. Joseph Chilton Pearce on spiritual development. Mother Teresa on love and service. Jack Kornfield on Buddhism for Americans. Fritjof Capra on the new paradigms. Rupert Sheldrake on morphic resonance. Karl Pribram on the holographic model. Claudio Naranjo on meditation, and more.The papers in this book were presented at the seventh Conference of the International Transpersonal Association held in Bombay. The ITA is a non-profit organization that brings together individuals of different nationalities, professions, and philosophical or spiritual preferences who share in the view that there is a fundamental unity underlying all of humanity and the material world.The cover photo is from the William Rockhill Nelson Gallery of Art in the Atkins Museum of Fine Arts, Kansas City, Missouri.

Argues that the tradition of critical theory has had significant problems dealing with the concept of nature and that their solutions require taking seriously the idea of nature as socially constructed.