Sunspots And The Sun King Book in PDF, ePub and Kindle version is available to download in english. Read online anytime anywhere directly from your device. Click on the download button below to get a free pdf file of Sunspots And The Sun King book. This book definitely worth reading, it is an incredibly well-written.
Mediation, monarchy, and Louis XIV's attempts to legitimize his reign In order to assert his divine right, Louis XIV missed no opportunity to identify himself as God’s representative on earth. However, in Sunspots and the Sun King Ellen McClure explores the contradictions inherent in attempting to reconcile the logical and mystical aspects of divine right monarchy. McClure analyzes texts devoted to definitions of sovereignty, presents a meticulous reading of Louis XIV’s memoirs to the crown prince, and offers a novel analysis of diplomats and ambassadors as the mediators who preserved and transmitted the king’s authority. McClure asserts that these discussions, ranging from treatises to theater, expose incommensurable models of authority and representation permeating almost every aspect of seventeenth-century French culture.
Science journalist and futurist Lawrence Joseph has studied the unprecedented solar storms since the last ice age and in Solar Cataclysm he reveals the monumental ecological, biological, emotional, political, financial, and cultural effects they have had in the past, and will ultimately have on humanity’s future. This timely, fascinating, and relevant book from the bestselling author of Apocalypse 2012 sounds an intelligent and urgent warning about the possible catastrophic consequences we will face in the coming years if we don’t listen to what the sun is trying to tell us. Popular science fans who made The World Without Us a runaway bestseller, readers open to new angles on history like those presented in Guns, Germs, and Steel, and anyone who is concerned about tomorrow and what we can do to ensure humankind’s survival must read Solar Cataclysm.
The Sun is so powerful, so much bigger than us, that it is a terrifying subject. Yet though we depend on it, we take it for granted. Amazingly the first book of its kind, CHASING THE SUNis a cultural and scientific history of our relationship with the star that gives us life. Richard Cohen, applying the same mix of wide-ranging reference and intimate detail that won outstanding reviews for By the Sword, travels from the ancient Greek astronomers to modern-day solar scientists, from Stonehenge to Antarctica (site of the solar eclipse of 2003, when penguins were said to sing), Mexico's Aztecs to the Norwegian city of Tromso, where for two months of the year there is no Sun at all. He introduces us to the crucial 'sunspot cycle' in modern economics, the religious dances of Indian tribesmen, the histories of sundials and calendars, the plight of migrating birds, the latest theories of global warming, and Galileo recording his discoveries in code, for fear of persecution. And throughout, there is the rich Sun literature -- from the writings of Homer through Dante and Nietzsche to Keats, Shelley and beyond. Blindingly impressive and hugely readable, this is a tour de force of narrative non-fiction.
Pyropolitics in the World Ablaze by Michael Marder Pdf
From books and heretics burnt on the pyres of the Inquisition to self-immolations at protest rallies, from the burning of fossil fuels to inflammatory speech, from the imagery of revolutionary sparks ready to ignite the spirits of the oppressed to car bombings and “scorched earth” policy, fire proves to be an indispensable element of the political. Pyropolitics in the World Ablaze builds upon the scintillating, by turns horrifying and hopeful, images and realities of flames, hearths, sparks, immolations, melting pots, incinerations, and burning in political thought and practices. Relying on classical political theory, theology, philosophy, literature and cinema, as well as an analysis of current events, Michael Marder argues that geo-politics, or the politics of the Earth, has always had an unstable, at once shadowy and blinding, underside—pyro-politics, or the politics of fire. If this obscure double of geopolitics is increasingly dictating the rules of the game today, then it is crucial to learn to speak its language, to discern its manifestations and to project where our world ablaze is heading. This new edition includes recent examples of the uses and accusations of ‘incendiary speech’ both by Donald Trump and by European populist right and exploration of threats of global warming that have now reached a turning point in our collective relation to the dangers and promises of fire .
Pyropolitics by Michael Marder, Author of Heidegger: Phenomenology, Ecology, Politics Pdf
A highly original theory of the political, the book explores the literal and metaphorical flare-ups in political theology, revolutionary thought, radical protests, and global energy production.
In Absolutist Attachments, Chloé Hogg uncovers the affective and media connections that shaped Louis XIV’s absolutism. Studying literature, painting, engravings, correspondence, and the emerging periodic press, Hogg diagnoses the emotions that created absolutism’s feeling subjects and publics. Louis XIV’s subjects explored new kinds of affective relations with their sovereign, joining with the king in acts of aesthetic judgment, tender feeling, or the “newsiness” of emerging print news culture. Such alternative modes of adhesion countered the hegemonic model of kingship upheld by divine right, reason of state, or corporate fidelities and privileges with subject-driven attachments and practices. Absolutist Attachments discovers absolutism’s alternative political and cultural legacy—not the spectacle of an unbound king but the binding connections of his subjects.
Opera and the Political Imaginary in Old Regime France by Olivia Bloechl Pdf
From its origins in the 1670s through the French Revolution, serious opera in France was associated with the power of the absolute monarchy, and its ties to the crown remain at the heart of our understanding of this opera tradition (especially its foremost genre, the tragédie en musique). In Opera and the Political Imaginary in Old Regime France, however, Olivia Bloechl reveals another layer of French opera’s political theater. The make-believe worlds on stage, she shows, involved not just fantasies of sovereign rule but also aspects of government. Plot conflicts over public conduct, morality, security, and law thus appear side-by-side with tableaus hailing glorious majesty. What’s more, opera’s creators dispersed sovereign-like dignity and powers well beyond the genre’s larger-than-life rulers and gods, to its lovers, magicians, and artists. This speaks to the genre’s distinctive combination of a theological political vocabulary with a concern for mundane human capacities, which is explored here for the first time. By looking at the political relations among opera characters and choruses in recurring scenes of mourning, confession, punishment, and pardoning, we can glimpse a collective political experience underlying, and sometimes working against, ancienrégime absolutism. Through this lens, French opera of the period emerges as a deeply conservative, yet also more politically nuanced, genre than previously thought.
In September of 1859, the entire Earth was engulfed in a gigantic cloud of seething gas, and a blood-red aurora erupted across the planet from the poles to the tropics. Around the world, telegraph systems crashed, machines burst into flames, and electric shocks rendered operators unconscious. Compasses and other sensitive instruments reeled as if struck by a massive magnetic fist. For the first time, people began to suspect that the Earth was not isolated from the rest of the universe. However, nobody knew what could have released such strange forces upon the Earth--nobody, that is, except the amateur English astronomer Richard Carrington. In this riveting account, Stuart Clark tells for the first time the full story behind Carrington's observations of a mysterious explosion on the surface of the Sun and how his brilliant insight--that the Sun's magnetism directly influences the Earth--helped to usher in the modern era of astronomy. Clark vividly brings to life the scientists who roundly rejected the significance of Carrington's discovery of solar flares, as well as those who took up his struggle to prove the notion that the Earth could be touched by influences from space. Clark also reveals new details about the sordid scandal that destroyed Carrington's reputation and led him from the highest echelons of science to the very lowest reaches of love, villainy, and revenge. The Sun Kings transports us back to Victorian England, into the very heart of the great nineteenth-century scientific controversy about the Sun's hidden influence over our planet.
The Maunder Minimum and the Variable Sun-Earth Connection by Willie Wei-Hock Soon,Steven H Yaskell Pdf
This book takes an excursion through solar science, science history, and geoclimate with a husband and wife team who revealed some of our sun's most stubborn secrets. E Walter and Annie S D Maunder's work helped in understanding our sun's chemical, electromagnetic and plasma properties. They knew the sun's sunspot migration patterns and its variable, climate-affecting, inactive and active states in short and long time frames. An inactive solar period starting in the mid-seventeenth century lasted approximately seventy years, one that E Walter Maunder worked hard to make us understand: the Maunder Minimum of c 1620–1720 (which was posthumously named for him). With ongoing concern over global warming, and the continuing failure to identify root causes driving earth's climatic changes, the Maunders' story outlines how our cyclical sun can alter climate. The book goes on to view the sun-earth connection in terms of geomagnetic variation and climatic change; contemporary views on the sun's operating mechanisms are explored, and the effects these have on the earth over long and short time scales are pondered. If not a call to widen earth's climate research to include the sun, this book strives to illustrate how solar causes and effects can influence earth's climate in ways we must understand in order to enhance solar system research and our well-being. Contents:A Sun Most Pure and Most LucidBackground of the Maunder MinimumThe Maunder Minimum: Europe, Asia, North AmericaSurveying the Maunder MinimumMaunder's Early Life and AssociationsThe Family Maunder: the BAA and Astronomy for AllA Particle Theory for the Sun-Earth ConnectionOur Knowledge of the Sun and Its Variability TodaySummary: Cycles of the Sun and Their Tie to EarthThe Maunders and Their Final Storyand other papers Readership: Researchers, scientists, college-level astrophysics students and readers interested in the history of solar science. Keywords:Maunder Minimum;Sun-Earth Connection;Sunspots;Solar Flares;Coronal Mass Ejections;Magnetic Dynamo;Geomagnetic Storms;Little Ice Age;History of Solar and Sun-Earth Connection SciencesReviews:“You have put together an impressive and fascinating collection of historical facts, combining the human condition and the condition of the climate and of the Sun. Your account is unique and valuable … When agriculture is disrupted by cold weather and the landlord still tries to collect the same rent, there is bound to be turmoil.”Eugene N Parker University of Chicago “Although the Maunder Minimum is a very well-known phenomenon in the history of paleoclimate, its explanation is still full of controversies. It is highly important, therefore, that the authors of this book have made a successful effort of collecting and discussing the entire existing factual information on the subject, as well as highlighting the theoretical considerations of the Maunder Minimum. This is an impressive step forward in the analysis of a most important phenomenon in the history of past climates. I find this effort both persuasive and perspective.”Kirill Ya Kondratyev Academician of the Russian Academy of Sciences “This is an excellent, well-balanced and informative book on an important phase in the study of sun-climate relations. After a brief introduction on early, most naked eye solar observation, it centers on the period of globally low temperatures, now known as the Maunder minimum. Many unknown historical observational data, from the various continents, are described. The book then describes the Maunder couple and their family, their life history in Victorian England and at the Greenwich Observatory, and their discovery of the Maunder (‘butterfly’) diagram and of the 17th century minimum in the sunspot activity and in related features such as auroras and tree-ring data. Their finding that the sunspot minimum might be related to the globally reduced temperatures may be considered as the early beginning of the study of Sun-Climate relations. The third part of the book is devoted to modern views on the Sun-Earth connection. This part too is written in a critical, informative and balanced way. I find this volume a fine contribution to the study of the Sun-Climate problem.”Cornelis de Jager Distinguished Solar Physicist SRON Laboratory for Space Research, The Netherlands “This book is a wonderful reading which combines intellectual ideas from various branches of modern science, i.e. astronomy, climatology, physics, history of science, biology, etc. The content is very deep and the authors are not afraid to show the soul of scientific methods to the reader. Yet the book avoids complicated mathematical details. The book is interesting for specialists and understandable for general public. One learns from the book about a cataclysm which happened about 350 years ago on the Sun supported and probed by various observational methods including the novel technique of learning about the Sun from other ‘solar stars’. A coherent understanding of the information obtained perhaps requires a century and this story looks more intriguing, rather like many crime stories. The Maunder minimum of solar activity affected various aspects of life on Earth and it is impossible to ignore related experiences by discussing such important topics as global warming, greenhouse effect, sun-climate relation, etc. I believe that everybody who would like to know what modern science offers about these varieties of topics can learn a great deal from the book of W Soon and S Yaskell.”Dmitry Sokoloff Professor of Mathematical Physics Moscow University “This book opens with a Foreword by Eugene N Parker, the world's leading authority on the solar wind and the effects of magnetic fields on the heliosphere … The details of this Sun-Earth connection are still to be discovered, but this book provides the historical evidence that must be taken into account as we improve our understanding of both the Sun and Earth's climate.”Eugene H Avrett Division Director Solar, Stellar, and Planetary Sciences Division, Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics “This book is a rich tapestry of scientific information and wide-ranging historical narrative, into which is woven the little-known personal story of Walter Maunder and his mathematician wife Annie. The authors see Maunder as clearly a man ahead of his time and his wife as a collaborator who brought the benefit of university training to an unusual and devoted partnership. They were among the most experienced eclipse observers of their day and were active promoters of amateur astronomy in Britain. They deserve a place in the annals of the Sun.”Mary Bruck Formerly from University of Edinburgh “This is a fascinating and wide-ranging book which deserves to be read by everyone with an interest in the Earth–Sun environment, in global warming and climatic change and in the history of science … it ends with a useful and non-mathematical summary on the modern view of solar magnetic mechanisms, and a short biography of the Maunders.”Journal of the British Astronomical Association “… offer a readable and engaging summary of the history and current status of sunspot understanding, sunspot observation, and linkages between sunspots and changes in Earth's atmosphere.”Choice “Drawing profitably from the latest research, this is a well-rounded, recommended read.”Astronomy Now “The main strength is that this book brings together a vast amount of diverse, but related, material … the authors have provided a very comprehensive and extremely valuable index of sources at the conclusion of the book. The compilation contains citations for many of the original sources, as well as recent reviews. This bibliography provides an excellent point of departure for those readers who, like numerous scientists, savants, and scholars of the last three centuries, have become hooked on deciphering the unfolding clues that underlie the variable Sun-Earth Connection.”Thomas J Bogdan Societal-Environmental Research and Education Laboratory, National Center for Atmospheric Research, Boulder, Colorado
Author : Ellen R. Welch Publisher : University of Pennsylvania Press Page : 309 pages File Size : 50,9 Mb Release : 2017-03-16 Category : History ISBN : 9780812293869
The seventeenth-century French diplomat François de Callières once wrote that "an ambassador resembles in some way an actor exposed on the stage to the eyes of the public in order to play great roles." The comparison of the diplomat to an actor became commonplace as the practice of diplomacy took hold in early modern Europe. More than an abstract metaphor, it reflected the rich culture of spectacular entertainment that was a backdrop to emissaries' day-to-day lives. Royal courts routinely honored visiting diplomats or celebrated treaty negotiations by staging grandiose performances incorporating dance, music, theater, poetry, and pageantry. These entertainments—allegorical ballets, masquerade balls, chivalric tournaments, operas, and comedies—often addressed pertinent themes such as war, peace, and international unity in their subject matter. In both practice and content, the extravagant exhibitions were fully intertwined with the culture of diplomacy. But exactly what kind of diplomatic work did these spectacles perform? Ellen R. Welch contends that the theatrical and performing arts had a profound influence on the development of modern diplomatic practices in early modern Europe. Using France as a case study, Welch explores the interconnected histories of international relations and the theatrical and performing arts. Her book argues that theater served not merely as a decorative accompaniment to negotiations, but rather underpinned the practices of embodied representation, performance, and spectatorship that constituted the culture of diplomacy in this period. Through its examination of the early modern precursors to today's cultural diplomacy initiatives, her book investigates the various ways in which performance structures international politics still.
Written in a light and friendly style, this lavishly illustrated book introduces the Sun and its physics, and describes all aspects of the Sun’s interaction with us on Earth. The second edition of this book updates the popular text by providing comprehensive accounts of the most recent discoveries made by five modern solar spacecraft during the past decade. It contains a number of images never before seen in print. Breakthrough observations with the underground Sudbury Neutrino Observatory are also included. The new edition further provides modern interpretations of ozone depletion and global warming.
Milton in the Long Restoration by Blair Hoxby,Ann Baynes Coiro Pdf
Milton criticism often treats the poet as if he were the last of the Renaissance poets or a visionary prophet who remained misunderstood until he was read by the Romantics. At the same time, literary histories of the period often invoke a Long Eighteenth Century that reaches its climax with the French Revolution or the Reform Bill of 1832. What gets overlooked in such accounts is the rich story of Milton's relationship to his contemporaries and early eighteenth-century heirs. The essays in this collection demonstrate that some of Milton's earliest readers were more perceptive than Romantic and twentieth-century interpreters. The translations, editions, and commentaries produced by early eighteenth century men of letters emerge as the seedbed of modern criticism and the term 'neoclassical' is itself unmasked as an inadequate characterization of the literary criticism and poetry of the period—a period that could brilliantly define a Miltonic sublime, even as it supported and described all the varieties of parody and domestication found in the mock epic and the novel. These essays, which are written by a team of leading Miltonists and scholars of the Restoration and eighteenth century, cover a range of topics—from Milton's early editors and translators to his first theatrical producers; from Miltonic similes in Pope's Iliad to Miltonic echoes in Austen's Pride and Prejudice; from marriage, to slavery, to republicanism, to the heresy of Arianism. What they share in common is a conviction that the early eighteenth century understood Milton and that the Long Restoration cannot be understood without him.
What if the stories of trees and people are more closely linked than we ever imagined? Winner of the World Wildlife Fund's 2020 Jan Wolkers PrizeOne of Science News's "Favorite Books of 2020" A New York Times "New and Noteworthy" BookA 2020 Woodland Book of the YearGold Winner of the 2020 Foreword INDIES Award in Ecology & EnvironmentBronze Winner of the 2021 Independent Publisher Book Award in Environment/Ecology People across the world know that to tell how old a tree is, you count its rings. Few people, however, know that research into tree rings has also made amazing contributions to our understanding of Earth's climate history and its influences on human civilization over the past 2,000 years. In her captivating book Tree Story, Valerie Trouet reveals how the seemingly simple and relatively familiar concept of counting tree rings has inspired far-reaching scientific breakthroughs that illuminate the complex interactions between nature and people. Trouet, a leading tree-ring scientist, takes us out into the field, from remote African villages to radioactive Russian forests, offering readers an insider's look at tree-ring research, a discipline known as dendrochronology. Tracing her own professional journey while exploring dendrochronology's history and applications, Trouet describes the basics of how tell-tale tree cores are collected and dated with ring-by-ring precision, explaining the unexpected and momentous insights we've gained from the resulting samples. Blending popular science, travelogue, and cultural history, Tree Story highlights exciting findings of tree-ring research, including the fate of lost pirate treasure, successful strategies for surviving California wildfire, the secret to Genghis Khan's victories, the connection between Egyptian pharaohs and volcanoes, and even the role of olives in the fall of Rome. These fascinating tales are deftly woven together to show us how dendrochronology sheds light on global climate dynamics and uncovers the clear links between humans and our leafy neighbors. Trouet delights us with her dedication to the tangible appeal of studying trees, a discipline that has taken her to austere and beautiful landscapes around the globe and has enabled scientists to solve long-pondered mysteries of Earth and its human inhabitants.
Physics of the Earth’s Space Environment by Gerd Prölss Pdf
Presents the experimental results while explaining the underlying physics on the basis of simple reasoning and agumentation. Assumes only basic knowledge of of fundamental physics and mathematics as usually required for introductory college courses in science or engineering curricula. Derives more specifics of selected topics as each phenomenon considered ,epmasizing an intuitive over a rigorous mathematical approach. Directed at a broad group of readers and students.
Recounts the story behind English astronomer Richard Carrington's observations of a mysterious explosion on the surface of the sun and how his understanding that the sun's magnetism directly influences the Earth helped usher in the modern era of astronomy.