History of Science

A compelling history of science from 1900 to the present day, this is the first book to survey modern developments in science during a century of unprecedented change, conflict and uncertainty. The sc

This reference for students and the general reader contains entries on people, terms, discoveries, publications, methods, and philosophies of the scientific revolution of the 16th and 17th centuries.

For 1,600 years Dioscorides (ca. ad 40–80) was regarded as the foremost authority on drugs. He knew mild laxatives and strong purgatives, analgesics for headaches, antiseptics for wounds, emetics to r

Man and Nature in the Renaissance offers an introduction to science and medicine during the earlier phases of the scientific revolution, from the mid-fifteenth century to the mid-seventeenth century. Renaissance science has frequently been approached in terms of the progress of the exact sciences of mathematics and astronomy, to the neglect of the broader intellectual context of the period. Conversely, those authors who have emphasized the latter frequently play down the importance of the technical scientific developments. In this book, Professor Debus amalgamates these approaches: The exact sciences of the period are discussed in detail, but reference is constantly made to religious and philosophical concepts that play little part in the science of our own time. Thus, the renewed interest in mystical texts and the subsequent impact of alchemy, astrology, and natural magic on the development of modern science and medicine are central to the account. Major themes that are followed throu

This volume offers to general and specialist readers alike the fullest and most complete survey of the development of science in the eighteenth century, exploring the implications of the 'scientific revolution' of the previous century and the major new growth-points, particularly in the experimental sciences. It is designed to be read as both a narrative and an interpretation, and also used as a work of reference. While prime attention is paid to western science, space is also given to science in traditional cultures and colonial science. The coverage strikes a balance between analysis of the cognitive dimension of science itself and interpretation of its wider social, economic and cultural significance. The contributors, world leaders in their respective specialities, engage with current historiographical and methodological controversies and strike out on positions of their own.

This book provides a comprehensive account of knowledge of the natural world in Europe, c.1500–1700. Often referred to as the Scientific Revolution, this period saw major transformations in fields as diverse as anatomy and astronomy, natural history and mathematics. Articles by leading specialists describe in clear, accessible prose supplemented by extensive bibliographies, how new ideas, discoveries, and institutions shaped the ways in which nature came to be studied, understood, and used. Part I frames the study of 'The New Nature' in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Part II surveys the 'Personae and Sites of Natural Knowledge'. Part III treats the study of nature by discipline, following the classification of the sciences current in early modern Europe. Part IV takes up the implications of the new natural knowledge for religion, literature, art, gender, and European identity.

This volume in the highly respected Cambridge History of Science series is devoted to the history of science in the Middle Ages from the North Atlantic to the Indus Valley. Medieval science was once universally dismissed as non-existent - and sometimes it still is. This volume reveals the diversity of goals, contexts and accomplishments in the study of nature during the Middle Ages. Organized by topic and culture, its essays by distinguished scholars offer the most comprehensive and up-to-date history of medieval science currently available. Intended to provide a balanced and inclusive treatment of the medieval world, contributors consider scientific learning and advancement in the cultures associated with the Arabic, Greek, Latin and Hebrew languages. Scientists, historians and other curious readers will all gain a new appreciation for the study of nature during an era that is often misunderstood.

Cabinets of Experimental Philosophy in Eighteenth-Century Europe explains how collections of instruments for demonstrating the principles of Newtonian science were offered successfully to a broad publ

In Scholars in Action, an international group of 40 authors open up new perspectives on the eighteenth-century culture of knowledge, with a particular focus on scholars and their various practices.

This volume in the highly respected Cambridge History of Science series is devoted to the history of science in the Middle Ages from the North Atlantic to the Indus Valley. Medieval science was once universally dismissed as non-existent - and sometimes it still is. This volume reveals the diversity of goals, contexts and accomplishments in the study of nature during the Middle Ages. Organized by topic and culture, its essays by distinguished scholars offer the most comprehensive and up-to-date history of medieval science currently available. Intended to provide a balanced and inclusive treatment of the medieval world, contributors consider scientific learning and advancement in the cultures associated with the Arabic, Greek, Latin and Hebrew languages. Scientists, historians and other curious readers will all gain a new appreciation for the study of nature during an era that is often misunderstood.

Describes how some of the most important, and sometimes the strangest, theories of physics were arrived at or proven.

This volume provides a history of the concepts, practices, institutions, and ideologies of social sciences (including behavioural and economic sciences) since the eighteenth century. It offers original, synthetic accounts of the historical development of social knowledge, including its philosophical assumptions, its social and intellectual organization, and its relations to science, medicine, politics, bureaucracy, philosophy, religion, and the professions. Its forty-two chapters include inquiries into the genres and traditions that formed social science, the careers of the main social disciplines (psychology, economics, sociology, anthropology, political science, geography, history, and statistics), and international essays on social science in Eastern Europe, Asia, Africa, and Latin America. It also includes essays that examine the involvement of the social sciences in government, business, education, culture, and social policy. This is a broad cultural history of social science, whi

This authoritative volume chronicles humanity's long quest to understand its own origins. Peter J. Bowler brilliantly synthesizes discoveries in geography, geology, and evolutionary biology that have

Encountering Crises of the Mind offers social and cultural historical perspectives to mental illness from late medieval times to modern age.

This book offers a survey of the historic development of selected areas of chemistry and chemical physics, discussing in detail the European, American and Russian approaches to the development of chem

In this book, the author pays tribute to Bernhard Riemann (1826–1866), mathematician with revolutionary ideas, whose work on the theory of integration, the Fourier transform, the hypergeometric differ

The story of superheavy elements - those at the very end of the periodic table - is not well known outside the community of heavy-ion physicists and nuclear chemists. But it is a most interesting st

This book traces the evolution of the ideas that eventually resulted in the elementary quantum theory in 1925/26. Further, it discusses the essential differences between the fundamental equations of Q

This monograph presents a new perspective on the history of general relativity. It outlines the attempts to establish an institutional framework for the promotion of the field during the Cold War. Rea

?This book is a collection of papers presented at the “Archimedes in the 21st Century” world conference, held at the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences in 2013. This conference focused on the

This book commemorates the 150th birthday of Corrado Segre, one of the founders of the Italian School of Algebraic Geometry and a crucial figure in the history of Algebraic Geometry. It is the outcome

This revealing work examines an approach from ancient astronomy to what was then a particularly important question, namely that of understanding the relationship between the position in the ecliptic a

This book addresses the historiography of mathematics as it was practiced during the 19th and 20th centuries by paying special attention to the cultural contexts in which the history of mathematics wa

This collection of essays discusses the marketing of scientific and medical instruments from the eighteenth century to the First World War. It features case-studies from the United Kingdom, the Americ

The contributions in this proceedings volume offer a new perspective on the mathematical ties between France and Italy, and reveal how mathematical developments in these two countries affected one ano

This volume presents the first critical edition of books III and IV of the final redaction of John Buridan's Questions Commentary on Aristotle's Physics. The edition is accompanied by a detailed guide

This book gathers the proceedings of the conference "Cultures of Mathematics and Logic," held in Guangzhou, China. The event was the third in a series of interdisciplinary, international con

The present book introduces an original (new) perspective on Cuba. This book revisits Cuba's choice, after the 1959 revolution, to develop an advanced healthcare and scientific system. It also introdu

This monograph is the first to analyze Julius Caesar Scaliger’s Exotericae Exercitationes (1557). In order to make this late-Renaissance work accessible to modern readers, Kuni Sakamoto conducted a de

The main focus of this proceedings volume is on the outstanding contribution made by the mathematical sciences and botany to the genesis and development of early modern garden art and garden culture.

Thiscollection presents significant contributions from an international network project on mathematicalcultures, including essays from leading scholars in the history and philosophyof mathematics and

The enigmatic nautical charts of the Mediterranean and Black Sea, known as portolan charts, which suddenly appeared in Italy in the thirteenth century are shown to be sophisticated maps the constructi

The 14 papers were developed from presentations at two conferences in Singapore during 2010 and 2013. The topics include the descent of theory, philosophical implications of connective histories of sc