Matter And Man

Originally published in 1957 and written by one of the 20th Century's leading botanists and a fierce advocate of organicism, this book explores concepts about man and his relation to life and the universe, and about the great creative and spiritual powers within and around him.

This book deals in popular form with some of main branches of modern physics. It tells of the universe and the laws governing the four states of matter and the three basic kinds of fields which man has got to know. It also considers some of the hypotheses concerning matter and the universe which must still be verified. It tells of the inroads into the universe which scientists are contemplating today with a view on the distant future.The authors present popular expositions of the fundamentals of gas dynamics, explosion theory and the dynamics, explosion theory and the dynamics of fields. Advances in these divisions of physics have made possible the great achievements of aviation, rocketry, hydraulic power production and thermal engineering. Some of the more complex physical phenomena are explained on simple examples from everyday life.Mikhail Vasilyev is a Soviet journalist and science popularizer whose books are known both in the Soviet Union and many other countries. His Reportage from the 21st Century has seen 25 printings in foreign countries. Other books of his include Travels into Outer Space, Metals and Man, Energy and Man and Nonmetals and Man, the last three being parts of a big series under the general heading The Universe an Man, on which he has been working for the last few years.Professor Kirill Stanyukovich is an eminent Soviet theoretical physicist. He is the author of numerous scientific works on gas dynamicsm cosmology and gravitational theory, many of which have been translated into foreign languages. One of his major contributions is the monograph Unsteady Gas Motion.

Originally published in 1957 and written by one of the 20th Century’s leading botanists and a fierce advocate of organicism, this book explores concepts about man and his relation to life and the universe, and about the great creative and spiritual powers within and around him. The author provides answers to perennial human questions whilst discussing the problems of sin, justice, ugliness and beauty.

This classic series of essays represents Alan Watts's thinking on the astonishing problems caused by our dysfunctional relationship with the material environment. Here, with characteristic wit, a philosopher best known for his writings and teachings about mysticism and Eastern philosophy gets down to the nitty-gritty problems of economics, technology, clothing, cooking, and housing. Watts argues that we confuse symbol with reality, our ways of describing and measuring the world with the world itself, and thus put ourselves into the absurd situation of preferring money to wealth and eating the menu instead of the dinner. With our attention locked on numbers and concepts, we are increasingly unconscious of nature and of our total dependence on air, water, plants, animals, insects, and bacteria. We have hallucinated the notion that the so-called external world is a cluster of objects separate from ourselves, that we encounter it, that we come into it instead of out of it. Originally published in 1972, Does It Matter? foretells the environmental problems that arise from this mistaken mind-set. Not all of Watts's predictions have come to pass, but his unique insights will change the way you look at the world.