The eighteenth century has long been considered critical for the development of modern chemistry, yet many features of the period remain largely unknown or unexplored. This volume details new approaches and topics to build a more complex view of chemical work during the period. Themes include late-phase alchemy, professionalization, chemical education, and the links and relations between chemistry and pharmacy, medicine, agriculture, and geology.
The eighteenth century has long been considered critical for the development of modern chemistry, yet many features of the period remain largely un...
The articles in this first volume of ARCHIMEDES explicitly and intentionally cross boundaries between science and technology, and they also illuminate one another. The first three contributions concern optics and industry in 19th century Germany; the fourth concerns electric standards in Germany during the same period; the last essay in the volume examines a curious development in the early history of wireless signalling that took place in England, and that has much to say about the establishment and enforcement of standard methods in a rapidly-developing technology that emerged out...
The articles in this first volume of ARCHIMEDES explicitly and intentionally cross boundaries between science and technology, and they also i...
In 1690, Christiaan Huygens (1629-1695) published Traite de la Lumiere, containing his renowned wave theory of light. It is considered a landmark in seventeenth-century science, for the way Huygens mathematized the corpuscular nature of light and his probabilistic conception of natural knowledge. This book discusses the development of Huygens' wave theory, reconstructing the winding road that eventually led to Traite de la Lumiere. For the first time, the full range of manuscript sources is taken into account. In addition, the development of Huygens' thinking on the nature of light is put...
In 1690, Christiaan Huygens (1629-1695) published Traite de la Lumiere, containing his renowned wave theory of light. It is considered a landmark i...
Many literary critics seem to think that an hypothesis about obscure and remote questions of history can be refuted by a simple demand for the production of more evidence than in fact exists. The demand is as easy to make as it is impossible to satisfy. But the true test of an hypothesis, if it cannot be shown to con?ict with known truths, is the number of facts that it correlates and explains. Francis M. Cornford 1914] 1934, 220. It was in the autumn of 1997 that the research project leading to this publication began. One of us GH], while a visiting fellow at the Center for Philosophy of...
Many literary critics seem to think that an hypothesis about obscure and remote questions of history can be refuted by a simple demand for the product...
Although the development of ideas about the motion and trajectory of comets has been investigated piecemeal, we lack a comprehensive and detailed survey of ph- ical theories of comets. The available works either illustrate relatively short periods in the history of physical cometology or portray a landscape view without adequate details. The present study is an attempt to review - with more details - the major physical theories of comets in the past two millennia, from Aristotle to Whipple. My research, however, did not begin with antiquity. The basic question from which this project...
Although the development of ideas about the motion and trajectory of comets has been investigated piecemeal, we lack a comprehensive and detailed surv...
An American Scientist on the Research Frontier is the first scholarly study of the nineteenth-century American scientist Edward Williams Morley. In part, it is the long-overdue story of a man who lent his name to the Michelson and Morley Ether-Drift Experiment, and who conclusively established the atomic weight of oxygen. It is also the untold story of science in provincial America: what Hamerla presents as science on the "American research frontier."
Hamerla carefully and usefully directs our attention away from more familiar sites of scientific activity during...
An American Scientist on the Research Frontier is the first scholarly study of the nineteenth-century American scientist Edward Wi...
This book includes most of the contributions presented at a conference on "Univ- sities and Science in the Early Modern Period" held in 1999 in Valencia, Spain. The conference was part of the "Five Centuries of the Life of the University of Valencia" (Cinc Segles) celebrations, and from the outset we had the generous support of the "Patronato" (Foundation) overseeing the events. In recent decades, as a result of a renewed attention to the institutional, political, social, and cultural context of scienti?c activity, we have witnessed a reappraisal of the role of the universities in the...
This book includes most of the contributions presented at a conference on "Univ- sities and Science in the Early Modern Period" held in 1999 in Valenc...
The distinction between the contexts of discovery and justification has left a turbulent wake in the philosophy of science. This book recognizes the need to re-open the debate about the nature, development, and significance of the context distinction, about its merits and flaws. The discussion clears the ground for the productive and fruitful integration of these new developments into philosophy of science.
The distinction between the contexts of discovery and justification has left a turbulent wake in the philosophy of science. This book recognizes th...
Why should mathematics, the purest of sciences, have a history? Medieval mathematicians took little interest in the history of their discipline. Yet in the Renaissance the history of mathematics flourished. This book explores how Renaissance scholars recovered and reconstructed the origins of mathematics by tracing its invention in prehistoric Antiquity, its development by the Greeks, and its transmission to modern Europe via the works of Euclid, Theon and Proclus. The principal architects of this story -- the French philosopher and University of Paris reformer Peter Ramus, and his critic,...
Why should mathematics, the purest of sciences, have a history? Medieval mathematicians took little interest in the history of their discipline. Ye...
Seen as a flash point of the Scientific Revolution, early modern astronomy witnessed an explosion of views about the function and structure of the world. This study explores these theories in a wide variety of settings, and challenges our view of modern science as the straightforward successor of Aristotelian natural philosophy.
Seen as a flash point of the Scientific Revolution, early modern astronomy witnessed an explosion of views about the function and structure of the wor...
