Kategoria BISAC: Science >> History

Through serious and absurd stories alike, Brooks takes readers back and forth in time, from dark, cavernous laboratories to the pristine facilities of the twenty-first century. Laugh along with Newton, peer at the moon with Galileo, work...

Ptolemy was the most important physical scientist of the Roman Empire, and for a millennium and a half his writings on astronomy, astrology, and geography were models for imitation, resources for new work, and targets of criticism. Ptolemy in Perspective traces reactions to Ptolemy from his own times to ours. The nine studies show the complex processes by which an ancient scientist and his work gained and subsequently lost an overreaching reputation and authority.

From prehistoric times, mankind has looked up at the night sky, and puzzled at the changing positions of the stars. How far away they are is a question that has confounded scientists for centuries. Over the last few hundred years, many scientific careers and considerable resources have been devoted to measuring their positions and motions with ever increasing accuracy. And in the last two decades of the 20th century, the European Space Agency developed and launched the Hipparcos satellite, around which this account revolves, to carry out these exacting measurements from space.

What has...

Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle, led a remarkable--and controversial--life, writing poetry and prose and philosophizing on the natural world at a time when women were denied any means of a formal education. Lisa T. Sarasohn acutely examines the brilliant work of this untrained mind and explores the unorthodox development of her natural philosophy.

Cavendish wrote copiously on such wide-ranging topics as gender, power, manners, scientific method, and animal rationality. The first woman to publish her own natural philosophy, Cavendish was not afraid to challenge the new...

Avner Ben-Zaken reconsiders the fundamental question of how early modern scientific thought traveled between Western and Eastern cultures in the age of the so-called Scientific Revolution.

Through five meticulously researched case studies--in which he explores how a single obscure object or text moved in the Eastern world--Ben-Zaken reveals the intricate ways that scientific knowledge moved across cultures. His diligent exploration traces the eastward flow of post-Copernican cosmologies and scientific discoveries, showing how these ideas were disseminated, modified, and applied to...

Though the Enlightenment was a time of amazing scientific change, science is an often-neglected facet of that time. Now, "Science in the Enlightenment" redresses the balance by covering all the major scientific developments in the period between Newton's discoveries in the late 1600s to the early 1800s of Michael Faraday and Georges Cuvier.

Over 200 A-Z entries explore a range of disciplines, including astronomy and medicine, scientists such as Sir Humphry Davy and Benjamin Franklin, and instruments such as the telescope and calorimeter. Emphasis is placed on the role of women, and...