Science is one of the main features of the contemporary world, and shapes our lives to an extent that has no precedents in history. Yet science as we know it today is the outcome of contingent social processes, and its global success is far from self-explanatory. How did it happen? How did science emerge in history and became the most authoritative source of knowledge available in late modern societies? This set of volumes addresses these crucial questions through a selection of exemplary publications spanning antiquity to the present day. The reader will find an effective survey of the best scholarship in this rapidly growing field, and a map of the main revolutions as well as the long-term continuities that have characterized our understanding the world and our attempts to control it. The collection brings together areas of inquiry that have become increasingly distant and specialized, such as the history of antique science or Cold War studies, within broader narratives of the making of the modern world. They also reassess the traditional assumption of the exclusively Greek and Western origins of modern science, situating relevant knowledge, practices, and artefacts within the global networks that sustained them: in ancient as well as in modern times. The gathered materials address key historiographical issues, such as the relationship between science, magic, and religion; the role of science in nation-building processes; and the relationship between science and technology.
Contents
Volume I Ancient Science
Acknowledgements
1 Hellenophilia versus the history of science
David Pingree
2 Affinities and elisions: Helen and Hellenocentrism
Heinrich von Staden
3 The historiography of Mesopotamian science
Francesca Rochberg
4 Egyptian mathematical texts and their contexts
Annette Imhausen
5 The adaptation of Babylonian methods in Greek numerical astronomy
Alexander Jones
6 Science in antiquity: the Greek and Chinese cases and their relevance to the problems of culture and cognition
Geoffrey Lloyd
7 Making up progress – in ancient Greek science writing
Markus Asper
8 Imagination and layered ontology in Greek mathematics
Reviel Netz
9 Hero of Alexandria’s mechanical geometry
Karin Tybjerg
10 A Roman engineer’s tales
Serafina Cuomo
11 Cicero’s astronomy
E. Gee
12 Machines, power and the ancient economy
Andrew Wilson
13 Women, writing and medicine in the classical world
Rebecca Flemming
14 Observers, objects, and the embedded eye; or, seeing and knowing in Ptolemy and Galen
Daryn Lehoux
15 The fundamental issues of the Chinese sciences
Geoffrey Lloyd and Nathan Sivin
16 Shock and awe: the performance dimension of Galen’s anatomy demonstrations
Maud W. Gleason
Volume II Medieval Science
Acknowledgements
17 When did modern science begin?
Edward Grant
18 Science and the early Christian church
David C. Lindberg
19 Situating Arabic science: locality versus essence
A. I. Sabra
20 The logic of non-Western science: mathematical discoveries in medieval India
David Pingree
21 Occult science and society in Byzantium: considerations for future research
Maria Mavroudi
22 Natural theology and the Qur’an
Robert G. Morrison
23 Freeing astronomy from philosophy: an aspect of Islamic influence on science
F. Jamil Ragep
24 The transmission of Arabic astronomy via Antioch and Pisa in the second quarter of the twelfth century
Charles Burnett
25 Cosmology and cosmogony in Doresh Reshumoth, a thirteenth-century commentary on the Torah
Y. Tzvi Langermann
26 A ‘college of astrology and medicine’? Charles V, Gervais Chrétien, and the scientific manuscripts of Maître Gervais’s College
Jean-Patrice Boudet
27 The Jesus hermaphrodite: science and sex difference in premodern Europe
Leah DeVun
28 Gendering the history of women’s healthcare
Monica H. Green
29 The impact of money on the development of fourteenth-century scientific thought
Joel Kaye
30 Technology and alchemical debate in the late Middle Ages
William Newman
31 Defining the boundaries of the natural in the fifteenth-century Brittany: the inquest into the miracles of Saint Vincent Ferrer (d. 1419)
Laura Smoller
Volume III Early Modern Science
Acknowledgements
32 The scientific revolution: a spoke in the wheel?
Roy Porter
33 Did science have a renaissance?
Brian P. Copenhaver
34 A sixteenth-century Arabic critique of Ptolemaic astronomy: the work of Shams al-Dīn al-Khafrī
George Saliba
35 A scholarly intermediary between the Ottoman Empire and Renaissance Europe
Robert Morrison
36 Animism and empiricism: Copernican physics and the origins of William Gilbert’s experimental method
John Henry
37 Knowledge in motion: following itineraries of matter in the early modern world
Pamela H. Smith
38 Galileo the emblem maker
Mario Biagioli
39 Possessing the past: the material world of the Italian Renaissance
Paula Findlen
40 Dissecting the female body: from women’s secrets to the secrets of nature
Katherine Park
41 Miracles, experiments, and the ordinary course of nature
Peter Dear
42 The house of experiment in seventeenth-century England
Steven Shapin
43 Alchemy restored
Lawrence M. Principe
44 Body and passions: materialism and the early modern state
Harold J. Cook
45 Patterns of transformation in seventeenth-century mechanics
Domenico Bertoloni Meli
46 Descartes’s geometry as spiritual exercise
Matthew L. Jones
47 On Yeti and being just: carving the borders of humanity in early modern China
Carla Nappi
Volume IV Science in the Age of Enlightenment
Acknowledgements
48 Science in the Enlightenment, revisited
Jan Golinski
49 Situating science in global history: local exchanges and networks of circulation
Lissa Roberts
50 Enlightened automata
Simon Schaffer
51 The role of musical analogies in Newton’s optical and cosmological work
Niccolò Guicciardini
52 Newton for ladies: gentility, gender and radical culture
Massimo Mazzotti
53 Machines in the garden
Jessica Riskin
54 French engineers become professionals; or, how meritocracy made knowledge objective
Ken Alder
55 The fiscal logic of enlightened German science
André Wakefield
56 Enlightenment calculations
Lorraine Daston
57 Global knowledge on the move: itineraries, Amerindian narratives, and deep histories of science
Neil Safier
58 Colonial encounters and the forging of new knowledge and national identities: Great Britain and India, 1760–1850
Kapil Raj
59 Visible empire: scientific expeditions and visual culture in the Hispanic enlightenment
Daniela Bleichmar
60 Medical experimentation and race in the eighteenth-century Atlantic world
Londa Schiebinger
61 Salon, academy, and boudoir: generation and desire in Maupertuis’s science of life
Mary Terrall
62 Nature as a marketplace: the political economy of Linnaean botany
Staffan Müller-Wille
63 Experimental spaces and the knowledge economy
Larry Stewart
64 The ghost of Rostow: science, culture and the British industrial revolution
William J. Ashworth
Volume V The Modern Physical and Mathematical Sciences
Acknowledgements
65 Quantification and the accounting ideal in science
Theodore M. Porter
66 The organic roots of Mendeleev’s periodic law
Michael D. Gordin
67 Einstein’s clocks: the place of time
Peter Galison
68 "An expedition to heal the wounds of war": the 1919 eclipse and Eddington as Quaker adventurer
Matthew Stanley
69 Worldviews and physicists’ experience of disciplinary change: on the uses of ‘classical’ physics
Richard Staley
70 Objectivity and the scientist: Heisenberg rethinks
Cathryn Carson
71 Freedom, collectivism, and quasiparticles: social metaphors in quantum physics
Alexei Kojevnikov
72 When computers were women
Jennifer S. Light
73 Stick-figure realism: conventions, reification, and the persistence of Feynman diagrams, 1948–1964
David Kaiser
74 What difference did computers make?
Jon Agar
75 Negotiating arithmetic, constructing proof: the sociology of mathematics and information technology
Donald MacKenzie
76 Negotiating global nuclearities: apartheid, decolonization, and the Cold War in the making of the IAEA
Gabrielle Hecht
Volume VI The Modern Life and Earth Sciences
Acknowledgements
77 Artisan botany
Anne Secord
78 The creed of science and its critics
Bernard Lightman
79 Science "gone native" in colonial India
Gyan Prakash
80 Race and language in the Darwinian tradition (and what Darwin’s language–species parallels have to do with it)
Gregory Radick
81 After the double helix: Rosalin Franklin’s research on Tobacco mosaic virus
Angela N. H. Creager and Gregory J. Morgan
82 Life, DNA and the model
Robert Bud
83 Making males aggressive and females coy: gender across the animal-human boundary
Erika Lorraine Milam
84 Towards a data base of dreams: assembling an archive of elusive materials, c. 1947–61
Rebecca Lemov
85 The ontology of the enemy: Norbert Wiener and the cybernetic vision’
Peter Galison
86 Communicating the north: scientific practice and Canadian postwar identity
Edward Jones-Imhotep
87 "Collective monitoring, collective defense": science, earthquakes, and politics in communist China
Fa-ti Fan
88 Challenging knowledge: how climate science became a victim of the Cold War
Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway
89 Imperial climatographies from Tyrol to Turkestan
Deborah R. Coen
90 Meteorology as infrastructural globalism
Paul N. Edwards
Index
Biography
Professor Massimo Mazzotti is Director, Center for Science, Technology, Medicine & Society at the University of California, Berkeley, USA.