Kategoria BISAC: Science >> History

How, asks James E. Strick, could spontaneous generation--the idea that living things can suddenly arise from nonliving materials--come to take root for a time (even a brief one) in so thoroughly unsuitable a field as British natural theology? No less an authority than Aristotle claimed that cases of spontaneous generation were to be observed in nature, and the idea held sway for centuries. Beginning around the time of the Scientific Revolution, however, the doctrine was increasingly challenged; attempts to prove or disprove it led to important breakthroughs in experimental design and...

China and Albert Einstein is the first extensive study in English or Chinese of China's reception of the celebrated physicist and his theory of relativity. Tracing the influence of Jesuit missionaries in the seventeenth century and Western missionaries and educators in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, as they introduced key concepts of Western physical science and paved the way for Einstein's radical new ideas, Danian Hu shows us that Chinese receptivity was fostered by the trickle of Chinese students sent abroad for study beginning in the mid-nineteenth century and by the...

In On Their Own Terms, Benjamin A. Elman offers a much-needed synthesis of early Chinese science during the Jesuit period (1600-1800) and the modern sciences as they evolved in China under Protestant influence (1840s-1900).

By 1600 Europe was ahead of Asia in producing basic machines, such as clocks, levers, and pulleys, that would be necessary for the mechanization of agriculture and industry. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Elman shows, Europeans still sought from the Chinese their secrets of producing silk, fine textiles, and porcelain, as well as large-scale...

Bored during Mass at the cathedral in Pisa, the seventeen-year-old Galileo regarded the chandelier swinging overhead--and remarked, to his great surprise, that the lamp took as many beats to complete an arc when hardly moving as when it was swinging widely. Galileo's Pendulum tells the story of what this observation meant, and of its profound consequences for science and technology.

The principle of the pendulum's swing--a property called isochronism--marks a simple yet fundamental system in nature, one that ties the rhythm of time to the very existence of matter in the...

For Albert Einstein, 1905 was a remarkable year. It was also a miraculous year for the history and future of science. In six short months, from March through September of that year, Einstein published five papers that would transform our understanding of nature. This unparalleled period is the subject of John Rigden's book, which deftly explains what distinguishes 1905 from all other years in the annals of science, and elevates Einstein above all other scientists of the twentieth century.

Rigden chronicles the momentous theories that Einstein put forth beginning in March 1905: his...

Alchemy can't be science--common sense tells us as much. But perhaps common sense is not the best measure of what science is, or was. In this book, Bruce Moran looks past contemporary assumptions and prejudices to determine what alchemists were actually doing in the context of early modern science. Examining the ways alchemy and chemistry were studied and practiced between 1400 and 1700, he shows how these approaches influenced their respective practitioners' ideas about nature and shaped their inquiries into the workings of the natural world. His work sets up a dialogue between what...

Benjamin Franklin's invention of the lightning rod is the founding fable of American science, but Franklin was only one of many early Americans fascinated by electricity. As a dramatically new physical experience, electricity amazed those who dared to tame the lightning and set it coursing through their own bodies. Thanks to its technological and medical utility, but also its surprising ability to defy rational experimental mastery, electricity was a powerful experience of enlightenment, at once social, intellectual, and spiritual.

In this compelling book, James...

Marianne Sommer unravels a riveting tale about a set of ancient human bones and their curious afterlife as a scientific object.

When the ochre-stained bones were unearthed in a Welsh cave in 1823, they inspired unsettling questions regarding their origin. Their discoverer, William Buckland, declared the remains to be Post-Diluvian, possibly those of a taxman murdered by smugglers. Shortly thereafter he reinterpreted the bones as those of a female fortune-teller in Roman Britain--and so began the casting and recasting of the Red Lady. Anthropologist William Sollas re-excavated...

The engineering of plants has a long history on this continent. Fields, forests, orchards, and prairies are the result of repeated campaigns by amateurs, tradesmen, and scientists to introduce desirable plants, both American and foreign, while preventing growth of alien riff-raff. These horticulturists coaxed plants along in new environments and, through grafting and hybridizing, created new varieties. Over the last 250 years, their activities transformed the American landscape.

"Horticulture" may bring to mind white-glove garden clubs and genteel lectures about growing better roses....

A Computer Perspective is an illustrated essay on the origins and first lines of development of the computer. The complex network of creative forces and social pressures that have produced the computer is personified here in the creators of instruments of computation, and their machines or tables; the inventors of mathematical or logical concepts and their applications; and the fabricators of practical devices to serve the immediate needs of government, commerce, engineering, and science.

The book is based on an exhibition conceived and assembled for International Business...

In 1997, even as Pope John Paul II was conceding that evolution was "more than just a theory," local school boards and state legislatures were still wrangling over the teaching of origins--and nearly half of all Americans polled believed in the recent special creation of the first humans. Why do so many Americans still resist the ideas laid out by Darwin in On the Origin of Species? Focusing on crucial aspects of the history of Darwinism in America, Ronald Numbers gets to the heart of this question.

Judiciously assessing the facts, Numbers refutes a host of widespread...

Reputed to have performed miraculous feats in New England--restoring the hair and teeth to an aged lady, bringing a withered peach tree to fruit--Eirenaeus Philalethes was also rumored to be an adept possessor of the alchemical philosophers' stone. That the man was merely a mythical creation didn't diminish his reputation a whit--his writings were spectacularly successful, read by Leibniz, esteemed by Newton and Boyle, voraciously consumed by countless readers. Gehennical Fire is the story of the man behind the myth, George Starkey.

Though virtually unknown today and little...

Only a scholar as rich in learning as I. Bernard Cohen could do justice to a theme so subtle and yet so grand. Spanning five centuries and virtually all of scientific endeavor, Revolution in Science traces the nuances that differentiate both scientific revolutions and human perceptions of them, weaving threads of detail from physics, mathematics, behaviorism, Freud, atomic physics, and even plate tectonics and molecular biology, into the larger fabric of intellectual history.

How did "revolution," a term from the physical sciences, meaning a turning again and implying...

The world's preeminent authority on Chinese science explores the philosophy, social structure, arts, crafts, and even military strategies that form our understanding of Chinese science, making instructive comparisons along the way to similar elements of Indian, Hellenistic, and Arabic cultures.

A major portion of the book concentrates on Taoist alchemy that led not only to the invention of gunpowder and firearms, but also, through the search for macrobiotic life-elixirs, to the rise of modern medical chemistry.

Taking advantage of documents never before available from the archives of the East German Communist Party and the Ministry for State Security, and drawing on interviews with, among others, the legendary spy chief Markus Wolf and members of the East German Politburo, Science under Socialism is the first book to examine the role of science and technology in the former German Democratic Republic. The result is a multi-layered analysis of the scientific enterprise that provides a fascinating glimpse into what it took to construct a new socialist state and the role science and technology...

The faith in science as an ally of political and economic progress, which Franklin and Jefferson made so firm a part of the American tradition, has been undermined by the very success of the scientific revolution. Has science become so powerful that it cannot be controlled by democratic processes? Is the scientific community acquiring a privileged role in government something like that of the ecclesiastical estate in the medieval world?

Writing from first-hand experience in government administration and his service on three presidential advisory panels, as well as from extensive...