E-Book Overview
A companion to such acclaimed works as The Age of Wonder, A Clockwork Universe, and Darwin’s Ghosts—a groundbreaking examination of the greatest event in history, the Scientific Revolution, and how it came to change the way we understand ourselves and our world. We live in a world transformed by scientific discovery. Yet today, science and its practitioners have come under political attack. In this fascinating history spanning continents and centuries, historian David Wootton offers a lively defense of science, revealing why the Scientific Revolution was truly the greatest event in our history. The Invention of Science goes back five hundred years in time to chronicle this crucial transformation, exploring the factors that led to its birth and the people who made it happen. Wootton argues that the Scientific Revolution was actually five separate yet concurrent events that developed independently, but came to intersect and create a new worldview. Here are the brilliant iconoclasts—Galileo, Copernicus, Brahe, Newton, and many more curious minds from across Europe—whose studies of the natural world challenged centuries of religious orthodoxy and ingrained superstition. From gunpowder technology, the discovery of the new world, movable type printing, perspective painting, and the telescope to the practice of conducting experiments, the laws of nature, and the concept of the fact, Wotton shows how these discoveries codified into a social construct and a system of knowledge. Ultimately, he makes clear the link between scientific discovery and the rise of industrialization—and the birth of the modern world we know.
E-Book Content
Title page of Francis Bacon, Novum organum (1620), which shows a ship sailing in through the Pillars of Hercules (identified with the strait between Gibraltar and North Africa – the opening from the Mediterranean to the Atlantic) after exploring an unknown world.
Dedication
For Alison Hanc ego de caelo ducentem sidera vidi (I have seen her draw down the stars from the sky) – Tibullus, Elegies, I.ii
Contents
Dedication List of Illustrations INTRODUCTION
1. Modern Minds 2. The Idea of the Scientific Revolution PART ONE
The Heavens and the Earth 3. Inventing Discovery 4. Planet Earth PART TWO
Seeing is Believing 5. The Mathematization of the World 6. Gulliver’s Worlds PART THREE
Making Knowledge 7. Facts 8. Experiments 9. Laws 10. Hypotheses/Theories 11. Evidence and Judgement
PART FOUR
Birth of the Modern 12. Machines 13. The Disenchantment of the World 14. Knowledge is Power CONCLUSION
The Invention of Science 15. In Defiance of Nature 16. These Postmodern Days 17. ‘What Do I Know?’ Some Longer Notes A Note on Greek and Medieval ‘Science’ A Note on Religion Wittgenstein: No Relativist Notes on Relativism and Relativists A Note on Dates and Quotations A Note on the Internet Acknowledgements Endnotes Bibliography Index Plate Section About the Author Credits Copyright About the Publisher
List of Illustrations
The pagination of this electronic edition does not match the edition from which it was made. To locate a specific passage, please use the search feature on your ebook reader.
ILLUSTRATIONS IN THE TEXT p. ii: Title page of Francis Bacon’s Novum organum (1620). (© The Trustees of the British Museum, London) p. vi: Archimedes in his bath, a woodcut by Peter Flötner (1490–1546). (National Museum, Madrid; photo © Tarker /Bridgeman Images) p. 14: Star map of Cassiopeia, from Tycho Brahe’s The New Star (1573). (Universal Images/ Getty Images) p. 56: Title page of Johannes Stradanus’s New Discoveries (c.1591). (Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam) p. 87: Johannes Hevelius, from Selenographia, (1647). (© The Royal Society, London) p. 97: ‘Mr P’s Snail’, from Roberval’s Mathematical Works (1731). (Leeds Univer