Kategoria BISAC: Science >> History

The discovery of the New World raised many questions for early modern scientists: What did these lands contain? Where did they lie in relation to Europe? Who lived there, and what were their inhabitants like? Imperial expansion necessitated changes in the way scientific knowledge was gathered, and Spanish cosmographers in particular were charged with turning their observations of the New World into a body of knowledge that could be used for governing the largest empire the world had ever known.

As Maria M. Portuondo here shows, this cosmographic knowledge had considerable strategic,...

The Scottish Enlightenment was a vital moment in the history of Western civilization. As one modern admirer of Scotland cogently wrote: "No small nation--except Greece--has ever achieved an intellectual and cultural breakthrough of this magnitude." Placing Isaac Newton's natural philosophy within a broad conceptual context, Seeking Nature's Logic takes that science from Galileo to the early nineteenth century, concentrating on Scotland during the 120 years from 1690 to 1810--a period defined by the publication of Newton's Principia in 1687 and the death of John Robison in...

In The Invention of Air, national bestselling author Steven Johnson tells the fascinating story of Joseph Priestley--scientist and theologian, protege of Benjamin...

It has been nearly 150 years since Darwin published On the Origin of Species, and his theory of natural selection still ignites a forest of heated debate between scientific fundamentalists on the one hand and religious fundamentalists on the other. But both sides actually agree more than they disagree, and what has long been needed is a third way to view evolution, one that focuses more on the aspect of life and "being alive," one that can guide us through, and perhaps out of, the fiery thicket. This book, a seminal work in the burgeoning field of Biosemiotics, provides that third way, by...

The birth of modern science was linked to the rise in Western Europe of a new sensibility, that of the scientific intellectual. Such a person was no more technician, looking at science as just a job to be done, but one for whom the scientific stand-point is a philosophy in the fullest sense. In The Scientific Intellectual, Lewis S. Feuer traces the evolution of this new human type, seeking to define what ethic inspired him and the underlying emotions that created him.

Under the influence of Max Weber, the rise of the scientific spirit has been viewed by sociologists as an...

A History of Science in Society: A Reader, edited by Andrew Ede and Lesley B. Cormack, is a collection of primary source documents and an excellent companion to their text by the same name. It includes scientific papers as well as more popular and cultural expressions of scientific ideas from the likes of Margaret Cavendish, Albert Einstein, and Rachel Carson. Readings from the pre-Scientific Revolution, the Middle Ages, the Islamic world, and women scientists are also well represented in this collection. Each of the over 90 readings begins with a short description providing...

In this classic work, the foremost historian of science in our time, George Sarton, sums up his reflections on the role of science and of the humanities in our culture. Voicing his opposition to the old-fashioned humanists on the one hand, and to the -uneducated- men of science and technicians on the other, Sarton points out to the former that the humanities without scientific are essentially incomplete. He warns the latter that without history, without philosophy, without arts and letters, without a living religion, human life on this planet would cease to be worthwhile.

After...

While we may be familiar with some of science's greatest equations, we may not know that each and every equation emerged not in "Eureka " moments but in years of cultural developments and scientific knowledge. With vignettes full of humor, drama, and eccentricity, philosopher and science historian Robert P. Crease shares the stories behind ten of history's greatest equations, from the "first equation," 1 + 1 = 2, which promises a rational, well-ordered world, to Heisenberg's uncertainty principle, which reveals the limitations of human knowledge. For every equation, Crease provides a brief...