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“There is no better way to open the mind than curiosity.” — Abbot Pluche Discover the marvellous history of popular science! Today, everyone enjoys the results of science… but it took so long to get there. Cicero was the first to translate scientific language so that his fellow citizens could understand it. Then, Galileo used dialogue to try convincing the Aristotelians that Earth moved. He failed, but his example lived on and inspired other scientists to do the same, until the scientific revolution started by Copernicus was accepted. And finally, Charles Darwin’s idea of evolutionism was matter of an heated debate in Oxford, and Victorian satirical periodicals made even fun of it; but because of all of this, the theory of the tree of life became widely spread and known. And there’s even more: the first scientific community, the origin of the peer review process and also the most famous scientific journals, like Nature… This and much more!
From 13th century Franciscan monks to Beyoncé in Black is King, Making a Spectacle charts the fascinating ascension of eyeglasses—from an unsightly but useful tool to fashion's must-have accessory. The power of glasses to convey a range of vivid messages about their wearers have made them into a billion-dollar business that appeals to cool kids and rock stars, and those who want to be like them, but the fashionable history of eyeglasses is fraught with anxiety and drama. At the beginning of the 20th century, the assessment in Vogue and Harper's Bazaar was that spectacles were "invariably disfiguring." Invisibility was the best option, and glasses were only to be put on once the lights at the opera went dark. While variations of that glasses-shaming sentiment appeared at regular intervals over the next 100 years or so, eyeglasses continued to evolve into an endless array of shapes, colors, purposes, and personalities. Once sunglasses took off in the 1930s, the magazine editorial made glasses a conspicuous part of the fashion narrative. Eyeglasses went to the ski slopes, the stables, the beach, the Havana hotel. Plastic innovations made a candy-colored rainbow of cat-eyes and "starlet" styles possible. Suddenly, everyone had the opportunity to look like Jackie O on vacation in Capri. Making a Spectacle traces contemporary high fashion frames back to their origins: the military aviator, the glam cat eye, the nerdly Oxford, the high-tech shield, the fanciful butterfly, the lowly rimless, and other styles all make an appearance. Featuring interviews with influential designers, makers, and purveyors of glasses including Adam Selman, Kerin Rose Gold, and l.a. Eyeworks, Making a Spectacle also takes a look at today's most cutting edge eyewear, showing the reader the latest and most innovative ways to see and be seen.
'Elegant and multi-focal. Glorious!' Simon Garfield The humble pair of glasses might just be one the world's greatest inventions, allowing millions to see a world that might otherwise appear a blur. And yet how much do many of us even really think about these things perched on the ends of our noses? In this eye-opening history Travis Elborough traces the fascinating true story of spectacles: from their inception as primitive visual aids to monkish scribes right through to today's designer eyewear and the augmented reality of Google Glass. And taking in along the way such delights as lorgnettes, monocles, pince-nez, tortoise-shell 'Windsors' and Ray Ban aviator shades. Peering into early theories about how the eye worked, he considers the theological and philosophical arguments about the limits of perception by Greek thinkers, Roman statesmen and Arab scholars. There are encounters with ingenious medieval Italian glassmakers, myopic Renaissance rulers and spectacle-makers and opticians, brilliant, mad, bad and dangerous to know, in the Londons of Samuel Pepys, Dr Johnson and Sherlock Holmes. We learn how eyeglasses were the making of the silent movie star Harold Lloyd and the rock n roller Buddy Holly and helped liberate an exasperated John Lennon from Beatlemania. Get hip to horn-rims with Dizzy Gillespie and Michael Caine And see girls in glasses through the lenses of the crime fiction by Dorothy L Sayers and Raymond Chandler and the full-screen figure of Marilyn Monroe. Through the Looking Glasses is about vision and the need for humanity to see clearly, and where the impulse to improve our eyesight has led us. The society of the spectacle may finally be upon us . . . but how much of it do we really see?
Deals with the history of eyeglasses from their invention in Italy ca. 1286 to the appearance of the telescope three cent. later. "By the end of the 16th cent. eyeglasses were as common in western and central Europe as desktop computers are in western developed countries today." Eyeglasses served an important technological function at both the intellectual and practical level, not only easing the textual studies of scholars but also easing the work of craftsmen/small bus. During the 15th cent. two crucial developments occurred: the ability to grind convex lenses for various levels of presbyopia and the ability to grind concave lenses for the correction of myopia. As a result, eyeglasses could be made almost to prescription by the early 17th cent. Illus.
In fourth-century Greece (BCE), the debate over the nature of philosophy generated a novel claim: that the highest form of wisdom is theoria, the rational 'vision' of metaphysical truths (the 'spectator theory of knowledge'). This 2004 book offers an original analysis of the construction of 'theoretical' philosophy in fourth-century Greece. In the effort to conceptualise and legitimise theoretical philosophy, the philosophers turned to a venerable cultural practice: theoria (state pilgrimage). In this practice, an individual journeyed abroad as an official witness of sacralized spectacles. This book examines the philosophic appropriation and transformation of theoria, and analyses the competing conceptions of theoretical wisdom in fourth-century philosophy. By tracing the link between traditional and philosophic theoria, this book locates the creation of theoretical philosophy in its historical context, analysing theoria as a cultural and an intellectual practice. It develops a new, interdisciplinary approach, drawing on philosophy, history and literary studies.