William Shakespeare lived at a remarkable time—a period we now recognize as the first phase of the Scientific Revolution. New ideas were transforming Western thought, the medieval was giving way to the modern, and the work of a few key figures hinted at the brave new world to come: the methodical and rational Galileo, the skeptical Montaigne, and—as Falk convincingly argues—Shakespeare, who observed human nature just as intently as the astronomers who studied the night sky. In The Science of Shakespeare, we meet a colorful cast of Renaissance thinkers, including Thomas Digges, who published the first English account of the "new astronomy" and lived in the same neighborhood as Shakespeare; Thomas Harriot—"England's Galileo"—who aimed a telescope at the night sky months ahead of his Italian counterpart; and Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe, whose observatory-castle stood within sight of Elsinore, chosen by Shakespeare as the setting for Hamlet—and whose family crest happened to include the names "Rosencrans" and "Guildensteren." And then there's Galileo himself: As Falk shows, his telescopic observations may have influenced one of Shakespeare's final works. Dan Falk's The Science of Shakespeare explores the connections between the famous playwright and the beginnings of the Scientific Revolution—and how, together, they changed the world forever.

In Shakespeare and the Dawn of Modern Science, renowned astronomy expert Peter Usher expands upon his allegorical interpretation of Hamlet and analyzes four more plays, Love's Labour's Lost, Cymbeline, The Merchant of Venice, and The Winter's Tale. With painstaking thoroughness, he dissects the plays and reveals that, contrary to current belief, Shakespeare was well aware of the scientific revolutions of his time. Moreover, Shakespeare imbeds in the allegorical subtext information on the appearances of the Sun, Moon, planets, and stars that he could not have known without telescopic aid, yet these plays appeared coeval with or prior to the commonly accepted date of 1610 for the invention and first use of the astronomical telescope. Dr. Usher argues that an early telescope, the so-called perspective glass, was the likely means for the acquisition of these data. This device was invented by the mathematician Leonard Digges, whose grandson of the same name contributed poems to the First and Second Folio editions of Shakespeare's plays. Shakespeare and the Dawn of Modern Science is an important addition to literature, history, and science collections as well as to personal libraries.

How can multicultural governance respond to our increasingly complex migratory world?

William Shakespeare found dozens of different ways to kill off his characters, and audiences today still enjoy the same reactions – shock, sadness, fear – that they did more than 400 years ago when these plays were first performed. But how realistic are these deaths, and did Shakespeare have the knowledge to back them up? In the Bard's day death was a part of everyday life. Plague, pestilence and public executions were a common occurrence, and the chances of seeing a dead or dying body on the way home from the theatre were high. It was also a time of important scientific progress. Shakespeare kept pace with anatomical and medical advances, and he included the latest scientific discoveries in his work, from blood circulation to treatments for syphilis. He certainly didn't shy away from portraying the reality of death on stage, from the brutal to the mundane, and the spectacular to the silly. Elizabethan London provides the backdrop for Death by Shakespeare, as Kathryn Harkup turns her discerning scientific eye to the Bard and the varied and creative ways his characters die. Was death by snakebite as serene as Shakespeare makes out? Could lack of sleep have killed Lady Macbeth? Can you really murder someone by pouring poison in their ear? Kathryn investigates what actual events may have inspired Shakespeare, what the accepted scientific knowledge of the time was, and how Elizabethan audiences would have responded to these death scenes. Death by Shakespeare will tell you all this and more in a rollercoaster of Elizabethan carnage, poison, swordplay and bloodshed, with an occasional death by bear-mauling for good measure.

History of Particle Theory fills an important gap existing in the literature by discussing the impressive progress in understanding the elementary particles out of which all everyday objects are made. Most of this progress has happened in the last seventy years after the theory of quantum electrodynamics (QED) was perfected as an extremely accurate description of electromagnetic interactions. This astonishing sequence of discoveries was made hand in hand between theory and experiment. This book concentrates only on theory where giant steps were made by a series of exceptionally creative physicists, and this is portrayed as an essential part of the broader spectrum of human knowledge and culture, which is constantly being similarly extended by the creative individuals such as the two mentioned in the subtitle, Between Darwin and Shakespeare, who both significantly changed Western Civilization by ideas in Biology and in English Literature respectively.In the last forty years, the standard model has been confirmed again and again as the correct description of elementary particles up to energies of a thousand times the proton mass. In the discussion of particle theory and theoretical physics in general, the book starts from well over two thousand years ago, going back to the ancient Greeks such as Democritus and Archimedes, until the 17th century, when the extraordinary intellect of Newton changed everything by demonstrating that not only objects in the laboratory but also heavenly bodies are governed by mathematical equations. There followed what can be called Darwinian evolution in theoretical physics, survival of the fittest theories, by loose analogy with the origin of biological species.The present standard model of particle theory surely cannot be the final word because it contains far too many free parameters. The book contains a penultimate chapter discussing a number of such open problems which exist in particle theory. There is then a closing chapter, not related to the rest of the book, providing a series of quotations written in the 16th and 17th centuries by Shakespeare and here applied to particle theory. The inclusion of this is based on our premise that particle theory is just one out of several opportunities for exceptional human creativity.

The importance of science and technology and future of education and research are just some of the subjects discussed here.