The story of this little-known Dutch physician "will interest students and practitioners of history, chemistry, and philosophy of science" ( Choice).In Inventing Chemistry, historian John C. Powers turns his attention to Herman Boerhaave (1668–1738), a Dutch medical and chemical professor whose work reached a wide, educated audience and became the template for chemical knowledge in the eighteenth century.The primary focus of this study is ...

"One of the most influential books of the 20th century," the landmark study in the history of science with a new introduction by philosopher Ian Hacking ( Guardian, UK).First published in 1962, Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions "reshaped our understanding of the scientific enterprise and human inquiry in general." In it, he challenged long-standing assumptions about scientific progress, arguing that transformative ideas don't ar...

This "fantastic revisionist history . . . captures the excitement of the scientific revolution and makes a point of celebrating the advances it ushered in" ( Financial Times).We live in a world transformed by scientific discovery. In The Invention of Science, historian David Wootton reveals why the Scientific Revolution was truly the greatest event in our history. Spanning continents and centuries, Wootton chronicles the factors that led to this cr...

Science: A Four Thousand Year History rewrites science's past. Instead of focussing on difficult experiments and abstract theories, Patricia Fara shows how science has always belonged to the practical world of war, politics, and business. Rather than glorifying scientists as idealized heroes, she tells true stories about real people - men (and some women) who needed to earn their living, who made mistakes, and who trampled down their rivals in their quest for success. Fara sweeps ...

**Finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Science & TechnologyNamed a Best Book of the Year by The New Yorker and The Economist"Quietly thrilling.…The story of humans measuring things is no less than the story of civilization." —Jennifer Szalai, New York Times Book ReviewA vibrant account of how measurement has invisibly shaped our world, from ancient civilizations to the modern day.**From the cubit to the kilogram, the hu...

The sixteenth and seventeenth centuries witnessed such fervent investigations of the natural world that the period has been called the 'Scientific Revolution.' New ideas and discoveries not only redefined what human beings believed, knew, and could do, but also forced them to redefine themselves with respect to the strange new worlds revealed by ships and scalpels, telescopes and microscopes, experimentation and contemplation.Driven by religious devotion, by practical need, by the promise ...

A riveting road map to the development of modern scientific thought.In the tradition of her perennial bestseller The Well-Educated Mind, Susan Wise Bauer delivers an accessible, entertaining, and illuminating springboard into the scientific education you never had. Far too often, public discussion of science is carried out by journalists, voters, and politicians who have received their science secondhand. The Story of Western Science shows us the ...

Leviathan and the Air-Pump examines the conflicts over the value and propriety of experimental methods between two major seventeenth-century thinkers: Thomas Hobbes, author of the political treatise Leviathan and vehement critic of systematic experimentation in natural philosophy, and Robert Boyle, mechanical philosopher and owner of the newly invented air-pump. The issues at stake in their disputes ranged from the physical integrity of the air-pump to the intellectual integrity o...

A religion professor elucidates the theory of the multiverse, its history, and its reception in science, philosophy, religion, and literature.Multiverse cosmologies imagine our universe as just one of a vast number of others. Beginning with ancient Atomist and Stoic philosophies, Mary-Jane Rubenstein links contemporary models of the multiverse to their forerunners and explores the reasons for their recent appearance. One concerns the so-called fine-tuning of the un...

An acclaimed biography of the Enlightenment's greatest mathematicianThis is the first full-scale biography of Leonhard Euler (1707–83), one of the greatest mathematicians and theoretical physicists of all time. In this comprehensive and authoritative account, Ronald Calinger connects the story of Euler's eventful life to the astonishing achievements that place him in the company of Archimedes, Newton, and Gauss. Drawing chiefly on Euler’s massive published works an...

How does the physics we know today - a highly professionalised enterprise, inextricably linked to government and industry - link back to its origins as a liberal art in Ancient Greece? What is the path that leads from the old philosophy of nature and its concern with humankind's place in the universe to modern massive international projects that hunt down fundamental particles and industrial laboratories that manufacture marvels? This Very Short Introduction introduces us to Islam...

In a startling reinterpretation of the evidence, Stillman Drake advances the hypothesis that Galileo's trial and condemnation by the Inquisition was caused not by his defiance of the Church, but by the hostility of contemporary philosophers. Galileo's own beautifully lucid arguments are used to show how his scientific method was utterly divorced from the Aristotelian approach to physics in that it was based on a search not for causes but for laws. Galileo's method was of overwhelming signi...