This was the first book of Asimov's that I read, and I think it give you a good grasp of what the late great writer's thought was like. You have some of the best short stories included, especially "Nightfall", one of the all-time SF classics, and some enduring favorites of mine, such as "Belief" (which asks what happens when a physicists finds out he can fly)and "Breeds There a Man?" (a rather unsettling tale about mankind's origins and future).

Asimov is at his best form with the short story (the famous Foundation Trilogy began as short stories), and these are the pick of the litter. I'm not sure how many people are aware of Asimov's interests in science history, and he has many delightful essays giving one a window into some of the lesser-known characters in scientific history, and some of Asimov's thoughts on the role of science. Of particular note is also his thesis that technology made slavery obsolete.

Only Asimov could write a book like this. It combines science fiction stories with real science without telling the reader which is which. You could almost use this book as a pocket reference if it weren't such entertaining reading. Of all the Asimov short story collections, I like this one best. Unfortunately my copy was misplaced, (I'm blaming my wife), and I can't seem to find it. Take care of yours!

This book is really friendly for a novice in composites. It contains a lot of theoretical and experimental data, solved problems and problems for the reader to solve and also lots of enlightening illustrations and figures. Chapters 7 and 8 nicely cover stress and failure analysis and characterization and testing subjects. Overall a very good book and up to date.

I like this text book for my under graduate students it has a lot of materials informations.

Issac Asimov's affection for astronomy sparkles throughout this thoroughly researched and very entertaining book. An impression of the instrument's dramatic impact on civilisation, is left with the reader. My copy was lost five years ago and I still pine for it. No doubt, had Asimov written 'A Brief History of Time' then quantum physicists would be more widely understood

Written on the eve of construction of the Hubble Space Telescope, Eyes on the Universe traces the development of optical telescopes from the human eye and Galileo's first night out to design considerations for HST. Find out why Galileo went blind, how Newton built the first reflector and why Lord Rosse got clouded out. Learn how giant telescopes and the replacement of the eyepiece with cameras allowed modern astronomers to storm the heavens and change our concepts about the size, age and origins of the cosmos. An excellent history and easy read for scientist and non-scientist alike, Asimov proves why he made tons more money writing science fact than science fiction

You could say I like Chelm stories, and that I buy every one I can.

You could also say that Isaac Bashevis Singer, who wrote this tale in 1973, was no ordinary purveyor of Chelm shtiklech. You can tell from his beginning, a master's parody of Genesis.

"The pious believed that God said, 'Let there be Chelm.' And there was Chelm. But many scholars insisted that the town happened as the result of an eruption.

" 'Before Chelm,' they said, 'the area was one huge chaos, all fog and mist. Then came a great explosion and Chelm appeared.

"At the beginning the surface of Chelm was so hot that even if Chelmites had already existed, they could not have walked on the earth because they would have burned their feet." The first Chemites, this version goes, were not people but microbes, amoebas and other such creatures. When people finally arrived in town, they had names like Gronam the First, aka Gronam Ox, and Dopey Lekisch, Zeinvel Ninny, Treitel Fool and Shmendrick Numskull. And they practically invented problems.

One of the biggest was that the people of nearby Gorshkov called the Chelmites fools. Gronam Ox told his compatriots, "We Chelmites know that, of the ten measures of wisdom sent down to earth from heaven, nine went to Chelm. But the conceited people of Gorshkov think they are the clever ones and we are the fools." What does he propose? Why making war, of course.

Needless to say, the Chelmnicks end up in the wrong place, a God-forsaken town called Mazelborsht (translation: luck soup). Defeated by their own foolishness, they returned to Chelm half naked, weaponless and with broken noses and black eyes. This produced the expected seven days and seven nights of contemplation which resulted in four sage proclamations.

Next the Chelmites abolished money, decided to hold elections once every 40 years, asked Zeckel Poet to compose a hymn of 12,000 lines which schoolchildren must learn by heart and appoint Shlemeil secretary. Of course, the merchants refused to part with their goods for nothing, which resulted in a system of barter in which Zeckel Poet was the most eager participant, followed by Shmoyger the matchmaker, Fultsha Jester and the Chelm band. Nothing was exchanged.

To discover what became of Singer's Chelm, you'll have to exchange some abolished currency for this masterwork, which contains much hilarity. And of course, you'll be in luck soup if you find a copy. Alyssa A. Lappen

It is always a pleasure to read something by I.B.Singer. Although this short tale is recommended for ages 9-12, it is certainly also addressed to any age beyond. The tale is a delightful satire of society's political and ideological systems, in may aspects a short version of George Orwell's "Animal Farm."

There's no real way to do justice to this monumental work, one of the most influential ones on later science fiction.

Rather than overpraise it, I will note that the style is a bit dated, but not sufficient to detract from its present day enjoyment. Notable is the lack of physical action and the fact that you don't even notice this lack.

Actually, this isn't as much a group of three novels as it is seven shorter works. They lead through a crucial part of Galactic history starting with the beginning of the First Foundation, the first predicted crises, and then the unpredicted emergence of The Mule which appears to throw Hari Seldon's psychohistory off course, up to the search for a Second Foundation, spurred by the political intrigue and power struggle Asimov handles so well.

If you've never read these stories, and if you appreciate expertly written science-fiction, you do owe it to yourself to read these.

This fantastic trilogy takes you through the fate of the universe. Of course which universe isn't ever exactly clear. The greatest feat of these three books, is their ability to never use any amount of action though, aside from the basic walking in and out of rooms, boarding craft and whatnot. In one of the later books in the series, (These first three were the original, but society demanded more), Asimov even himself said that he was surprised at the lack of action. Wonderful books though.

This is a very important book, and a reprint edition would be welcome indeed. I have found it to be fascinating.

Take the following passage (pp. 168-169) from the chapter titled "Methodology", for example:

'Many of the annotations in Keynes MS 58 and at least some of the processes derive from John de Monte Snyders' "The Metamorphosis of the Planets". Snyders wrote other works, and apparently all of them were published in Latin or in German, but "The Metamorphosis of the Planets" had only German editions and seems to have existed in English translation only in manuscript. Newton somewhere acquired a copy of it and made a complete, carefully written transcript of it which included an elaborate title-page and a detailed symbolic frontispiece. Newton also numbered the pages and even the lines, for easy reference. By handwriting, Newton's transcript probably dates from early in the 1670s.

'Newton's autograph transcript of Snyder's work was one of the items that so horrified Sir David Brewster when he went through Newton's papers in the middle of the nineteenth century, it will be recalled. And truly it is a distressing document to read, being a complicated allegory that rambles on through thirty-one chapters. The whole comprises sixty-four pages, and in Newton's small early handwriting that is a substantial amount of material. Very little of it is couched in rationalistic language.

'Nevertheless, Brewster would perhaps not have been so horrified had he looked a litle further and seen what Newton did with the material. For the essence of Newton's approach to Snyders was exactly the same as that which he used in the interpretation of prophecy: a rational, matter-of-fact analysis aimed at finding the true "significations" of Snyders' allegorical figures and their actions. The only variation in method in the case of this alchemical study was that Newton, instead of checking his "significations" against actual historical events as in the case of prophecy, in alchemy checked them against experimental results.

'So that it may be seen just how great a distance Newton had to travel to get from Snyders to the laboratory, one passage in which Snyders treats of the eagle and scepter of Jupiter (or Jove) will be given here. . .'

If you have any interest in Sir Isaac Newton or in the early history of experimental chemistry, Dr. Dobbs' study is an essential part of your reading, well worth tracking down.

Was Newton an alchemist?

When John Maynard Keynes purchased a trunkful of Sir Isaac Newton's private papers at a Sotheby's auction early in this century, he was shocked to find out how much time and effort Newton had spent in alchemical pursuits. This book explores why Newton did so.

Keynes' reaction after reading Newton's alchemical notes was to label him "the last of the magicians".

Similarly embarrassed by alchemical writings in Sir Isaac's own hand they found among his papers, Newton's Enlightenment-era biographers had suppressed mention of his work in alchemy--or dismissed it as a recreation, pursued as a diversion from his "real" work in establishing the foundations of modern mathematical physics.

They all missed the point of Newton's alchemical work, because they only saw it through the lenses of their own eras. They projected the effects of the great man's discoveries backward into the years before the discoveries, when he and his contemporaries struggled to find ANY conceptual keys that would fit the locks of physical reality. Keynes and the biographers simply forgot that "the past is a different country: they do things differently there."

Dr. Dobbs' carefully researched study goes a long way toward correcting these misunderstandings of Newton. She explores Newton's extensive alchemical experiments in the historical context of his own era, and shows how this research influenced key elements in his discovery of testable physical laws.

In the last lecture of his 1964 series on "The Character of Physical Law", Caltech physicist Richard Feynman described what it takes to seek new such laws:

"...The truth always turns out to be simpler than you thought. What we need is imagination, but imagination in a terrible strait-jacket. We have to find a new view of the world that has to agree with everything that is known, but disagree in its predictions somewhere. . . . And in that disagreement it must agree with nature. If you can find any other view of the world which agrees over the entire range where things have already been observed, but disagrees somewhere else, you have made a great discovery. ...A new idea is extremely difficult to think of. It takes a fantastic imagination."

Newton had both that fantastic imagination and the incredible discipline it took to put it into Feynman's strait-jacket. As Dr. Dobbs shows in her book, his fine-grained experimental investigation of the claims of alchemy developed both his amazing powers of concentration and the broad range of ideas to try that he could bring to bear on a problem.

While Newton may well have been disappointed by his years of intense alchemical research, it was still an important part of the rigorous intellectual regimen he set for himself in pursuing verifiable truths. His alchemical studies fed his imagination fruitful ideas to be tried in his other areas of research. He tested some of these ideas mathematically against accurate observations and experimental results reported by Tycho Brahe, Johannes Kepler and Galileo Galilei, and changed the way we view the world forever. Read this book carefully, and you'll have a better understanding of how--and why--he did it.

-dubhghall

Realmente este libro es excelente,me incito a interesarme mucho mas en los libros de Isaac Asimov y en la ciencia ficcion en general. Esta mal llamada trilogia (son mas de 3 libros) realmente es buenisima,vale la pena leerla. Tal vez mi comentario es un tanto escueto,pero creo que refleja lo que me provoca este libro.Prefiero no entrar en detalles en cuanto a la historia,eso lo dejo para que cada lector lo descubra.

Uno de los mejores libros de Isaac Asimov. Aqui nos presenta las dos caracteristicas que lo convirtieron en uno (si no el mejor) escritor de ciencia ficcion: una interezante trama y un final inesperado. Tambien tengo que menicionar que Plaza & James nos presenta una excelente traduccion de este libro de I. Asimov. No nos presenta con las traducciones correctas sin utilizar palabras cuyo significado puede no ser el mismo en otros paises del habla español (como si han hecho en otras publicaciones). Lo unico que si me parece innecesario fue la "introduccion" por Carlo Frasetti. Espero que disfruten el libro tanto como yo.

This book is a great handbook for people working to analyze the research they have compiled or for people preparing to do a report from a compilation of data. It helps with every step along the way. It gives 9 basic methods of research, so there is a good chance that your needs will be met. This book outlines how to go about starting, collecting your data/research, and how to compile it into a report. It is extremely helpful and its information is easily accessible for those without any formal training in research and evaluation. The only problem with this book is in its very nature. As a handbook, it covers only the bare bones of research and evaluation--and in the preface the authors suggest that you supplement your reading of this book with "standard texts or qualified consultants" in this area.

This handbook is one of the most authoritative references I have found on research and evaluation methods. It is designed for the education or behavioral science researcher, but students of any type of social science research will find much to offer here. It contains some of the best bibliographic references on the subject of research to be found anywhere. If you are a graduate student or seasoned researcher, you will find something of value in this book. I have literally worn the cover off of my second edition copy. The third edition is even better than the first or second. It is on my reference shelf, within easy reach, and I recommend it to my students in classes in research methods. I cannot recommend it too highly.

The book is excellently compiled and written. Thank you, Charles E Finsley. The letters were written to my great aunt - Hannah Speaker and it is wonderful to read my ancestors thoughts.
My great thanks to Marchtotheseabks - for their prompt service in shipping the book the day after I placed my order. I had it within a week of ordering. It had to come from Tennessee to Washington state.

I would recommend this book to anyone curious about the Civil War. I was captivated start to finish and found it to be a great indicator of the time period.

This book will surprise you! It has a brief review in the beginning of each chapter of the relevant physiology, and the rest of the chapter illustrates how the drug affects the "pristine order" of the principles described previously, so there`s a line of thinking that is followed from beginning to end, starting in the basic physiology and ending in the adverse effects and drug interactions. There is not too much information printed, which makes the book ideal to learn quickly and effectively, nothing like Katzung, where you take a whole afternoon to read a chapter. There are some beautifully conceived schemes and graphics that help a lot in understanding this part of medical science. The only bad thing for a European reader like me is that it is adjusted to the american reality .

This book is written by a medical college professor, for medical students, and review is usually used for USMLE, but when I saw the book, This is excellent book for students in pharmacy proffession too, because the author of this book is a Pharmacist first and then a Medical college professor, so this is a book for every medical profession student and teachers. This book is an excellent way to prepare for the NAPLEX exam. It is comprehensive, well written, and worth every penny. I atteneded a live teaching course presented by the author in OKLAHOMA STATE UNIVERSITY COLLEGE OF OSTEOPATHIC MEDICINE and it was also EXCELLENT. I learned more in that course than I learned in 5 years of pharmacy school.