| 9780061759529 |
| 006175952X |
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|---|---|---|---|---|---|
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Summary
Summary
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.
Reviews (3)
Publisher's Weekly Review
This substantive narrative of human progress is engaging and well constructed for the general science or history reader. Wooton (Galileo: Watcher of the Skies), professor of history at the University of York, makes a powerful, though currently unpopular, case against a Wittgensteinian historical relativism that sees science as entirely a social construct, changing gradually and continuously since antiquity. Wooton argues instead for viewing the period between 1572 and 1704 as a scientific revolution in a true sense, during which multiple strands of thought, technology, and culture came together in unexpected ways to transform human understanding of the physical world-the "triumph of Newtonianism," which still informs modern research and dialogue. Analysis of primary texts from key philosophers as well as chronological details of their development and use of instrumentation sit beside broader-reaching approaches that explore linguistic change over time, how perspective-drawing techniques influenced astronomy, the ways the printing press helped form critical communities, and social analyses of the "mathematization of nature" and the decline of the appeal to authority, among other topics. Wooton's arguments stand effectively on their own, making the final chapters directed at his historian colleagues feel like bloated academic infighting. Illus. (Dec.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
*Starred Review* An illusion is all that Steven Shapin sees in the historical episode named in the title of his The Scientific Revolution (1996). Probing that same episode, Wootton finds a transformative reality. Manifested in the pathbreaking labors of scientists from astronomer Tycho Brahe (who began reworking the map of the heavens upon the unexpected appearance of a nova in 1572) to Isaac Newton (who dissected the colors of the rainbow in 1704), that reality animates a radically new mindset, as bold thinkers embark on intellectual voyages of discovery as audacious as Columbus' journey across oceans. Taking mathematics, not Aristotelian philosophy, as their guide, these pioneers employ new instruments of observation (including telescopes and microscopes) and a new lexicon of hypothesis, experimentation, and empirical verification as they replace popular misconceptions with precisely formulated natural laws. Though these revolutionaries start by reinterpreting celestial dynamics along Copernican lines, Wootton credits them with a profound reordering of terrestrial life as they uncover the principles that enable engineers to construct the steam engines of the Industrial Revolution. Breaking decisively with postmodern relativists, Wootton hails science as a uniquely progressive force, one opening a truly reliable access to reality, not just one more socially constructed perspective. A bracing rediscovery of the marvel that is science.--Christensen, Bryce Copyright 2015 Booklist
Library Journal Review
This highly linguistic take on the scientific revolution is not for the easily daunted. Wootton (history of science, Univ. of York; Galileo) paints an intriguing picture of how language and science evolved together from 1572 to 1704. He points out that the concept of "discovery" was largely unknown before -Christopher Columbus's journey to America, and that specialized terms such as scientist, fact, or experiment didn't take hold until the 16th century. The book begins chronologically, but readers without a firm grounding in early modern science may get lost. Another flaw is the almost complete lack of women in the narrative. Although the major players in the scientific revolution were male, Wootton mentions quite a number of obscure male contributors, so it would have been nice to include at least a few women. Most critically, this work doesn't address modern debates about science in day-to-day life (the reliability of scientific proof of global warming, evolution, etc.) and is focused instead on debunking the relativist perspective of the history of science. VERDICT Although academics, who will catch the foreshadowing, will have no trouble following -Wootton's argument, casual readers are likely to quit before they reach the payoff.-Cate Hirschbiel, Iwasaki Lib., Emerson Coll., Boston © Copyright 2015. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Table of Contents
| List of Illustrations | p. ix |
| Intorduction | |
| 1 Modern Minds | p. 3 |
| 2 The Idea of the Scientific Revolution | p. 15 |
| Part 1 The Heavens and the Earth | |
| 3 Inventing Discovery | p. 57 |
| 4 Planet Earth | p. 110 |
| Part 2 Seeing is Believing | |
| 5 The Mathematization of the World | p. 163 |
| 6 Gulliver's Worlds | p. 211 |
| Part 3 Making Knowledge | |
| 7 Facts | p. 251 |
| 8 Experiments | p. 310 |
| 9 Laws | p. 361 |
| 10 Hypotheses/Theories | p. 380 |
| 11 Evidence and Judgement | p. 400 |
| Part 4 Birth of the Modern | |
| 12 Machines | p. 431 |
| 13 The Disenchantment of the World | p. 449 |
| 14 Knowledge is Power | p. 476 |
| Conclusion The Invention of Science | |
| 15 In Defiance of Nature | p. 511 |
| 16 These Postmodern Days | p. 544 |
| 17 'What Do I Know?' | p. 556 |
| Some Longer Notes | p. 573 |
| A Note on Greek and Medieval 'Science' | p. 573 |
| A Not on Religion | p. 575 |
| Wittgenstein: No Relativist | p. 577 |
| Notes on Relativism and Relativists | p. 580 |
| A Note on Dates and Quotations | p. 592 |
| A Note on the Internet | p. 592 |
| Acknowledgements | p. 595 |
| Endnotes | p. 599 |
| Bibliography | p. 655 |
| Index | p. 723 |
