Van Nostrand's Scientific Encyclopedia


Van Nostrand's Scientific Encyclopedia is an encyclopaedia published in the United States. Currently in a three volume 10th edition, it was published in two volumes for editions 6 to 9. The 8th edition is available as two CD ROMs.

The first edition was published in 1938.

More than 4,000 pages long, the work provides a thorough scientific reference, while establishing a midpoint between massive multi-volume science encyclopedias and handheld reference books.

This work is sometimes compared to the McGraw-Hill Concise Encyclopedia of Science & Technology.

Famous quotes containing the words van and/or scientific:

    The totality of our so-called knowledge or beliefs, from the most casual matters of geography and history to the profoundest laws of atomic physics or even of pure mathematics and logic, is a man-made fabric which impinges on experience only along the edges. Or, to change the figure, total science is like a field of force whose boundary conditions are experience.
    —Willard Van Orman Quine (b. 1908)

    Truth is that concordance of an abstract statement with the ideal limit towards which endless investigation would tend to bring scientific belief, which concordance the abstract statement may possess by virtue of the confession of its inaccuracy and one-sidedness, and this confession is an essential ingredient of truth.
    Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–1914)