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A physicist and historian sheds light on scientific minds, breakthroughs, and innovations that paved the way for the Scientific Revolution. Histories of modern science often begin with the heroic battle between Galileo and the Catholic Church, a conflict which ignited the Scientific Revolution and led to the world-changing discoveries of Isaac Newton. As a consequence of this narrative frame, virtually nothing is said about the European scholars who came before. In reality, more than a millennium before the Renaissance, a succession of scholars paved the way for the exciting discoveries usually credited to Galileo, Newton, Copernicus, and others. In Before Galileo, John Freely examines the pioneering research of the first European scientists, many of them monks whose influence ranged far beyond the walls of the monasteries where they studied and wrote.
Arun Bala challenges Eurocentric conceptions of history by showing how Chinese, Indian, Arabic, and ancient Egyptian ideas in philosophy, mathematics, cosmology and physics played an indispensable role in making possible the birth of modern science.
The period from the late fourth to the late second century B. C. witnessed, in Greek-speaking countries, an explosion of objective knowledge about the external world. WhileGreek culture had reached great heights in art, literature and philosophyalreadyin the earlier classical era, it is in the so-called Hellenistic period that we see for the ?rst time — anywhere in the world — the appearance of science as we understand it now: not an accumulation of facts or philosophically based speculations, but an or- nized effort to model nature and apply such models, or scienti?ctheories in a sense we will make precise, to the solution of practical problems and to a growing understanding of nature. We owe this new approach to scientists such as Archimedes, Euclid, Eratosthenes and many others less familiar todaybut no less remarkable. Yet, not long after this golden period, much of this extraordinary dev- opment had been reversed. Rome borrowed what it was capable of from the Greeks and kept it for a little while yet, but created very little science of its own. Europe was soon smothered in theobscurantism and stasis that blocked most avenues of intellectual development for a thousand years — until, as is well known, the rediscovery of ancient culture in its fullness paved the way to the modern age.
"This book attempts to introduce to its readers major chapters in the history of science. It tries to present science as a human endeavor - a great achievement, and all the more human for it. In place of the story of progress and its obstacles or a parade of truths revealed, this book stresses the contingent and historical nature of scientific knowledge. Knowledge, science included, is always developed by real people, within communities, answering immediate needs and challenges shaped by place, culture, and historical events with resources drawn from their present and past. Chronologically, this book spans from Pythagorean mathematics to Newton's Principle. The book starts in the high Middle Ages and proceeds to introduce the readers to the historian's way of inquiry. At the center of this introduction is the Gothic Cathedral - a grand achievement of human knowledge, rooted in a complex cultural context, and a powerful metaphor for science. The book alternates thematic chapters with chapters concentrating on an era. Yet it attempts to integrate discussion of all different aspects of the making of knowledge: social and cultural settings, challenges and opportunities; intellectual motivations and worries; epistemological assumptions and technical ideas; instruments and procedures. The cathedral metaphor is evoked intermittently throughout, to tie the many themes discussed to the main lesson: that the complex set of beliefs, practices, and institutions we call science is a particular, contingent human phenomenon"--
Originally published in English in 1973. This volume traces the development of the revolution which so drastically altered man’s view of the universe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The "astronomical revolution" was accomplished in three stages, each linked with the work of one man. With Copernicus, the sun became the centre of the universe. With Kepler, celestial dynamics replaced the kinematics of circles and spheres used by Copernicus. With Borelli the unification of celestial and terrestrial physics was completed by abandonment of the circle in favour the straight line to infinity.
This history of the birth of modern science shatters the illusion that science is 'dry' and divorced from culture by exploring the powerful clashes between traditions and value systems that gave rise to it. The author shows how many of the characteristics that distinguish science today emerged in the midst of the wars and plagues of the seventeenth century and defines what was new about this form of knowledge.
A wide-ranging exploration of how music has influenced science through the ages, from fifteenth-century cosmology to twentieth-century string theory. In the natural science of ancient Greece, music formed the meeting place between numbers and perception; for the next two millennia, Pesic tells us in Music and the Making of Modern Science, “liberal education” connected music with arithmetic, geometry, and astronomy within a fourfold study, the quadrivium. Peter Pesic argues provocatively that music has had a formative effect on the development of modern science—that music has been not just a charming accompaniment to thought but a conceptual force in its own right. Pesic explores a series of episodes in which music influenced science, moments in which prior developments in music arguably affected subsequent aspects of natural science. He describes encounters between harmony and fifteenth-century cosmological controversies, between musical initiatives and irrational numbers, between vibrating bodies and the emergent electromagnetism. He offers lively accounts of how Newton applied the musical scale to define the colors in the spectrum; how Euler and others applied musical ideas to develop the wave theory of light; and how a harmonium prepared Max Planck to find a quantum theory that reengaged the mathematics of vibration. Taken together, these cases document the peculiar power of music—its autonomous force as a stream of experience, capable of stimulating insights different from those mediated by the verbal and the visual. An innovative e-book edition available for iOS devices will allow sound examples to be played by a touch and shows the score in a moving line.
This book reveals the multi-generational process involved in humanity's first major scientific achievement, namely the discovery of modern physics, and examines the personal lives of six of the intellectual giants involved. It explores the profound revolution in the way of thinking, and in particular the successful refutation of the school of thought inherited from the Greeks, which focused on the perfection and immutability of the celestial world. In addition, the emergence of the scientific method and the adoption of mathematics as the central tool in scientific endeavors are discussed. The book then explores the delicate thread between pure philosophy, grand unifying theories, and verifiable real-life scientific facts. Lastly, it turns to Kepler’s crucial 3rd law and shows how it was derived from a mere six data points, corresponding to the six planets known at the time. Written in a straightforward and accessible style, the book will inform and fascinate all aficionados of science, history, philosophy, and, in particular, astronomy.
At a time when religion and science are seen by many to be antagonists locked in a battle to the death, Professor Hooykaas offers a startling proposition: modern science, he suggests, is in good part a product of the Judeo-Christian influence on western thought.