**SHORTLISTED FOR THE ANDRE SIMON FOOD BOOK AWARDSHORTLISTED FOR THE FORTNUM AND MASON FOOD BOOK AWARDSHORTLISTED FOR THE GUILD OF FOOD WRITERS FOOD BOOK AWARDA playful and accessible guide to fermenting at home**James Read is on a mission to smuggle bacteria into our kitchens. In Of Cabbages & Kimchi, he takes the ten greatest 'living' ferments - fermented foods that are neither cooked nor pasteurized - and places them under the microscope, before co...

The programme of 'constructive axiomatics', promulgated by Hans Reichenbach in 1924, seeks to build up the architecture of our best theories of physics from basic axioms supposedly imbued with immediate and indubitable empirical content. Taking inspiration from Reichenbach, Hermann Weyl proposed his own 'causal-inertial' approach to the constructive axiomatization of Einstein's general relativity, according to which a relativistic spacetime can be constructed solely from the trajectories o...

It is often claimed that Einstein's magnum opus---his 1915 theory of General Relativity---is distinguished from other theories of space and time in virtue of its background independence. It's also often claimed that background independence is an essential feature of any quantum theory of gravity. But are these claims true? This book aspires to offer definitive answers to both of these questions, by (a) charting the space of possible definitions of background independence, and (b) applying ...

This Element presents the philosophy of special relativity, from the foundations of the theory in Newtonian mechanics, through its birth out of the ashes of nineteenth-century ether theory, through the various conceptual paradoxes which the theory presents, and finally arriving at some of its connections with Einstein's later theory of general relativity. It illustrates concepts such as inertial frames, force-free motion, dynamical versus geometrical understandings of physics, the standard...

Two generations of students inspired by Harvey Mansfield come together here to demonstrate how their diverse approaches illuminate the topic of the arts of rule and speak to the wide scope of Mansfield's contributions. The essays collected here cover both ancient and modern ground. The first section covers topics such as Xenophon's question of what it is to be a gentleman, Aristotle's view of friendship, Montaigne's account of the highest good, and Montesquieu's elevation of modesty. The s...