Knowledge History

As a botanist and professor of plant ecology, Robin Wall Kimmerer has spent a career learning how to ask questions of nature using the tools of science. As a Potawatomi woman, she learned from elders, family, and history that the Potawatomi, as well as a majority of other cultures indigenous to this land, consider plants and animals to be our oldest teachers.

People are now exposed to more information than ever before, provided both by technology and by increasing access to every level of education. These societal gains, however, have also helped fuel a surge in narcissistic and misguided intellectual egalitarianism that has crippled informed debates on any number of issues. Today, everyone knows everything and all voices demand to be taken with equal seriousness, and any claim to the contrary is dismissed as undemocratic elitism.

Regarded as one of the brightest young scientists of his generation, Lewis Dartnell proposes that the key to preserving civilization in an apocalyptic scenario is to provide a quickstart guide, adapted to cataclysmic circumstances. The Knowledge describes many of the modern technologies we employ, but first it explains the fundamentals upon which they are built. The Knowledge is a brilliantly original guide to the fundamentals of science and how it built our modern world as well as a thought experiment about the very idea of scientific knowledge itself.

Just when you thought that it was safe to start showing off again, John Lloyd and John Mitchinson are back with another busload of mistakes and misunderstandings. Here is a new collection of simple, perfectly obvious questions you'll be quite certain you know the answers to. Whether it's history, science, sports, geography, literature, language, medicine, the classics, or common wisdom, you'll be astonished to discover that everything you thought you knew is still hopelessly wrong.

When someone is labeled a nihilist, it's not usually meant as a compliment. Most of us associate nihilism with destructiveness and violence. Nihilism means, literally, "an ideology of nothing". Is nihilism, then, believing in nothing? If we can learn to recognize the many varieties of nihilism, Nolen Gertz writes, then we can learnto distinguish what is meaningful from what is meaningless. In this addition to the MIT Press Essential Knowledge series, Gertz traces the history of nihilism in Western philosophy from Socrates through Hannah Arendt and Jean-Paul Sartre.

In Burning the Books, Richard Ovenden describes the deliberate destruction of knowledge held in libraries and archives from ancient Alexandria to contemporary Sarajevo, from smashed Assyrian tablets in Iraq to the destroyed immigration documents of the UK Windrush generation.

Artificial intelligence powers Google's search engine, enables Facebook to target advertising, and allows Alexa and Siri to do their jobs. AI is also behind self-driving cars, predictive policing, and autonomous weapons that can kill without human intervention. These and other AI applications raise complex ethical issues that are the subject of ongoing debate. This volume in the MIT Press Essential Knowledge series offers an accessible synthesis of these issues.

The Arabic legacy of science and philosophy has long been hidden from the West. British-Iraqi physicist Jim Al-Khalili unveils that legacy to fascinating effect by returning to its roots in the hubs of Arab innovation that would advance science and jump-start the European Renaissance.

In this audiobook, machine learning expert Ethem Alpaydin offers a concise overview of the subject for the general listener, describing its evolution, explaining important learning algorithms, and presenting example applications. Alpaydin offers an account of how digital technology advanced from number-crunching mainframes to mobile devices, putting today's machine learning boom in context.

The history of computing could be told as the story of hardware and software or the story of the Internet or the story of "smart" handheld devices, with subplots involving IBM, Microsoft, Apple, Facebook, and Twitter. In this concise and accessible account of the invention and development of digital technology, computer historian Paul Ceruzzi offers a broader and more useful perspective. He identifies four major threads that run throughout all of computing's technological development.

Everyone's a cynic, yet few will admit it. Today's cynics excuse themselves half-heartedly - "I hate to be a cynic, but...." - before making their pronouncements. Narrowly opportunistic, always on the take, contemporary cynicism has nothing positive to contribute. The Cynicism of the ancient Greeks, however, was very different. Bold and shameless, it was committed to transforming the values on which civilization depends.

Although it is among the oldest of market institutions, the auction is ubiquitous in today's economy, used for everything from government procurement to selling advertising on the Internet to course assignment at MIT's Sloan School. Yet beyond the small number of economists who specialize in the subject, few people understand how auctions really work. This concise, accessible, and engaging book explains both the theory and the practice of auctions.

In this volume in the MIT Press Essential Knowledge series, Amaranth Borsuk considers the history of the book, the future of the book, and the idea of the book. Tracing the interrelationship of form and content in the book's development, she bridges book history, book arts, and electronic literature to expand our definition of an object we thought we knew intimately. Contrary to the many reports of its death (which has been blamed at various times on newspapers, television, and e-readers), the book is alive.

Peter Bandettini covers the essentials of fMRI, providing insight and perspective from his nearly three decades of research. He describes other brain imaging and assessment methods; the sources of fMRI contrasts; the basic methodology, from hardware to pulse sequences; brain activation experiment design strategies; and data and image processing. A unique, stand-alone chapter addresses major controversies in the field, outlining 26 challenges that have helped shape fMRI research.

Drawing from her experiences as an Indigenous scientist, botanist Robin Wall Kimmerer demonstrated how all living things—from strawberries and witch hazel to water lilies and lichen—provide us with gifts and lessons every day in her bestselling book Braiding Sweetgrass. Adapted for young adults by Monique Gray Smith, this new edition reinforces how wider ecological understanding stems from listening to the earth's oldest teachers: the plants around us.

From the creation of the first encyclopedia to Wikipedia, from ancient museums to modern kindergarten classes—this is Simon Winchester’s brilliant and all-encompassing look at how humans acquire, retain, and pass on information and data, and how technology continues to change our lives and our minds. Throughout this fascinating tour, Winchester forces us to ponder what rational humans are becoming. What good is all this knowledge if it leads to lack of thought? What is information without wisdom?

A paradigm-shifting work that revolutionizes our understanding of the origins and structure of science.

No other monument in the world evokes mystery like the Great Sphinx of Giza. It has survived the harsh climate of Egypt for thousands of years and will remain long after our own civilization is gone. According to orthodox Egyptology, the Sphinx was built around 2500 BCE as a memorial to the pharaoh Khafre. Yet this “fact” has scant to no supportive evidence. When was the Sphinx really built and, most importantly, why?

The beginning of the modern contraceptive era began in 1882, when Dr. Aletta Jacobs opened the first birth control clinic in Amsterdam. The founding of this facility, and the clinical provision of contraception that it enabled, marked the moment when physicians started to take the prevention of pregnancy seriously as a medical concern. In this volume in the MIT Press Essential Knowledge series, Donna Drucker traces the history of modern contraception, outlining the development, manufacturing, and use of contraceptive methods from the opening of Dr. Jacobs' clinic to the present.

In Consilience (a word that originally meant "jumping together"), Edward O. Wilson renews the Enlightenment's search for a unified theory of knowledge in disciplines that range from physics to biology, the social sciences and the humanities. Using the natural sciences as his model, Wilson forges dramatic links between fields. Presenting the latest findings in prose of wonderful clarity and oratorical eloquence, and synthesizing it into a dazzling whole, Consilience is science in the path-clearing traditions of Newton, Einstein, and Richard Feynman.