The Beginnings of Piezoelectricity, the first history of the subject, exhaustively examines how diverse influences led to the discovery of the phenomenon in 1880, and how they shaped subsequent research until the consolidation of an empirical and theoretical knowledge of the field circa 1895. Shaul Katzir’s historical account shows that this ‘mundane’ science was an intriguing intellectual and practical enterprise, which involved originality, surprises and controversies.

The number-one reference on the topic now contains a wealth of new data: The entire relevant literature over the past six years has been painstakingly surveyed, resulting in hundreds of new descriptors being added to the list, and some 3,000 new references in the bibliography section. Volume 1 contains an alphabetical listing of more than 3300 descriptors and related terms for chemoinformatic analysis of chemical compound properties, while the second volume lists over 6,000 references selected from 450 journals. To make the data even more accessible, the introductory section has been completely re-written and now contains several "walk-through" reading lists of selected keywords for novice users.

G. G. Stokes and Lord Kelvin helped bring about conceptual and institutional changes that transformed the science of physics. Indeed, they and their Victorian colleagues constituted one of the most significant groups of scientists in the whole history of science. This collection of letters was first published in 1990, and provides, therefore, invaluable insight and information for a period of major historical importance. Stokes and Kelvin corresponded for over fifty years as professors in Cambridge and Glasgow, respectively, thus amassing what is easily the largest extant correspondence between two Victorian physicists. The letters range widely over the people, ideas, and institutions of the age. They illuminate the histories of Cambridge and Glasgow Universities and the Royal Society of London, for example, as well as developments in electromagnetism, hydrodynamics, elasticity, optics, and X-rays. The editor's introduction describes the context of the pair's careers, while guiding the reader into their correspondence.

A geometric figure has chirality, or handedness, if its mirror image cannot be brought to coincide with itself. The concept of chirality was instrumental in establishing the tetrahedral valences of the carbon atom, and has continued to play a key role in chemistry and molecular biology ever since.The fact that living organisms use only one of two mirror isomers of such molecules as amino acids and sugars, that is, the question of the origin of homochirality of the molecular basis of life, remains an unsolved problem of the same dignity as the origin of dark matter and dark energy.The increasing importance of chirality and topology in condensed matter physics and chemistry, and the production of new states of matter in heavy-ion collisions, have brought the concept of chirality into physics and cosmology in a tangible way while at the same time expanded the physics/chemistry interface. The book is the first to address all aspects of chirality in a single volume.