Born in Penzance in 1778, Humphry Davy's scientific reputation grew with his pioneering discoveries of nitrous oxide (laughing gas), sodium, calcium and the invention of the miners' Davy lamp.

An entertaining, accessible biography of Humphry Davy, professional scientist, inventor, and poet.

The period of Britain’s Industrial Revolution was perhaps the most transformative era in the nation’s history. Between about 1750 and 1914, life and work, home and school, church and community changed irreversibly for Britain’s rapidly expanding population. Lives were transformed, some for the better, but many endured abysmal domestic and workplace conditions. Eventually improvements were made to Britain’s social fabric which led to the prospect of richer and more fulfilled lives for working men, women and even children. Focusing on 100 objects that either directly influenced, or arose from, these changes, John Broom offers a distinctive insight into this fascinating age. With plentiful illustrations and suggestions for visits to hundreds of places of historical interest, this book makes an ideal companion for a journey into Britain’s industrial past.

This invaluable book is a unique collection of tributes to outstanding discoveries pioneered by Leon Chua in nonlinear circuits, cellular neural networks, and chaos. It is comprised of three parts. The first OCo cellular nonlinear networks, nonlinear circuits and cellular automata OCo deals with Chua''s Lagrangian circuits, cellular wave computers, bio-inspired robotics and neuro-morphic architectures, toroidal chaos, synaptic cellular automata, history of Chua''s circuits, cardiac arrhythmias, local activity principle, symmetry breaking and complexity, bifurcation trees, and Chua''s views on nonlinear dynamics of cellular automata. Dynamical systems and chaos is the scope of the second part of the book, where we find genius accounts on theory and application of Julia set, stability of dynamical networks, chaotic neural networks and neocortical dynamics, dynamics of piecewise linear systems, chaotic mathematical circuitry, synchronization of oscillators, models of catastrophic events, control of chaotic systems, symbolic dynamics, and solitons. First hand accounts on the discovery of memristors in HP Labs, historical excursions into OCyancient memristorsOCO, analytical analysis of memristors, and hardware memristor emulators are presented in the third and final part of the book.The book is quintessence of ideas on future and emergent hardware, analytic theories of complex dynamical systems and interdisciplinary physics. It is a true Renaissance volume where bright ideas of electronics, mathematics and physics enlighten facets of modern science.The unique DVD covers the artistic aspects of chaos, such as several stunningly melodious musical compositions using chaotic atttractors, a virtual gallery of hundreds of colorful attractors, and even a cartoon-like play on the genesis of Chua''s circuit that was based on a widely acclaimed performance in Rome and other venues in Italy. In short, it is a veritable kaleiscope of never-before-published historical, pedagogical, and futuristic technical visions on three timely topics of intense interest for both lay readers and experts alike."

What did it mean to be a scientist before the profession itself existed? Jan Golinski finds an answer in the remarkable career of Humphry Davy, the foremost chemist of his day and one of the most distinguished British men of science of the nineteenth century. Originally a country boy from a modest background, Davy was propelled by his scientific accomplishments to a knighthood and the presidency of the Royal Society. An enigmatic figure to his contemporaries, Davy has continued to elude the efforts of biographers to classify him: poet, friend to Coleridge and Wordsworth, author of travel narratives and a book on fishing, chemist and inventor of the miners’ safety lamp. What are we to make of such a man? In The Experimental Self, Golinski argues that Davy’s life is best understood as a prolonged process of self-experimentation. He follows Davy from his youthful enthusiasm for physiological experiment through his self-fashioning as a man of science in a period when the path to a scientific career was not as well-trodden as it is today. What emerges is a portrait of Davy as a creative fashioner of his own identity through a lifelong series of experiments in selfhood.