Leviathan and the Air-Pump examines the conflicts over the value and propriety of experimental methods between two major seventeenth-century thinkers: Thomas Hobbes, author of the political treatise Leviathan and vehement critic of systematic experimentation in natural philosophy, and Robert Boyle, mechanical philosopher and owner of the newly invented air-pump. The issues at stake in their disputes ranged from the physical integrity of the air-pump to the intellectual integrity of the knowledge it might yield. Both Boyle and Hobbes were looking for ways of establishing knowledge that did not decay into ad hominem attacks and political division. Boyle proposed the experiment as cure. He argued that facts should be manufactured by machines like the air-pump so that gentlemen could witness the experiments and produce knowledge that everyone agreed on. Hobbes, by contrast, looked for natural law and viewed experiments as the artificial, unreliable products of an exclusive guild. The new approaches taken in Leviathan and the Air-Pump have been enormously influential on historical studies of science. Shapin and Schaffer found a moment of scientific revolution and showed how key scientific givens--facts, interpretations, experiment, truth--were fundamental to a new political order. Shapin and Schaffer were also innovative in their ethnographic approach. Attempting to understand the work habits, rituals, and social structures of a remote, unfamiliar group, they argued that politics were tied up in what scientists did, rather than what they said. Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer use the confrontation between Hobbes and Boyle as a way of understanding what was at stake in the early history of scientific experimentation. They describe the protagonists' divergent views of natural knowledge, and situate the Hobbes-Boyle disputes within contemporary debates over the role of intellectuals in public life and the problems of social order and assent in Restoration England. In a new introduction, the authors describe how science and its social context were understood when this book was first published, and how the study of the history of science has changed since then.

Dubbed a National Treasure by Gough Whitlam, a Gay Icon by Les McDonald and a Household Name by the Sydney Morning Herald ('so is Sorbent,' her unimpressed mother remarked), Jacki Weaver has combined a distinguished acting career with a tumultuous personal life. A self-confessed bolter and adventuress, with five marriages under her tiny belt, there have been times of great wealth (most notably during her marriage to Derryn Hinch) and times of scraping along. There have always been headlines galore, and occasionally heartbreak. Jacki's career has spanned more than forty fabulous years of theatre, film, television and music. Jacki is the recipient of multiple Australian awards and more recently for her performance in Animal Kingdom she has received many US film critics' association nominations, including for the Golden Globes, USA. She won the Best Supporting Actress award in the Los Angeles Film Critics Association Awards as well as in the National Board of Review Awards. In January 2011 she was nominated for Best Actress in a Supporting Role in the Academy Awards. Much Love, Jac is the extraordinary story of a talented actor who has lived her life to the very fullest. Fascinating, funny and poignant, this is storytelling at its best.