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This anthology contains selected papers from the 'Science as Culture' conference held at Lake Como, and Pavia University Italy, 15-19 September 1999. The conference, attended by about 220 individuals from thirty countries, was a joint venture of the International History, Philosophy and Science Teaching Group (its fifth conference) and the History of Physics and Physics Teaching Division of the European Physical Society (its eighth conference). The magnificient Villa Olmo, on the lakeshore, provided a memorable location for the presentors of the 160 papers and the audience that discussed them. The conference was part of local celebrations of the bicentenary of Alessandro Volta's creation of ...
More than 850 individuals partly forgotten by name, but sometimes found in historical writings, together with many well known or recently deceased persons are presented in terms of bio-data, short career highlights, and main advances made to the profession with a short biography of the main writings. If available, a portrait is also included.
Between 1650 and 1750, four Catholic churches were the best solar observatories in the world. Built to fix an unquestionable date for Easter, they also housed instruments that threw light on the disputed geometry of the solar system, and so, within sight of the altar, subverted Church doctrine about the order of the universe. A tale of politically canny astronomers and cardinals with a taste for mathematics, "The Sun in the Church" tells how these observatories came to be, how they worked, and what they accomplished. It describes Galileo's political overreaching, his subsequent trial for heresy, and his slow and steady rehabilitation in the eyes of the Catholic Church. And it offers an enlig...
In this book, Brendan Dooley examines Italian scientific communications in early modern history. He demonstrates that Italian science between the age of Galileo and the age of Galvani and Volta underwent two revolutions. While the methodological innovations of the time have received copious attention, Dooley is concerned with the revolution in published communicatons, which has hardly been studied at all. What his innovative research shows, in sum, is that the accomplishments of Galvani and Volta were not based upon a cultural void, but rather a century and a half of fervid activity aiming to consolidate the accomplishments of Galileo, reinforce scientific institutions, establish observation and experiment as the dominant methodology, and improve science's public relations. This process challenged traditional institutional hierarchies of specialized knowledge and had far-reaching, interdisciplinary implications for the development of universities, the profession of university science researcher, the academies, and even state government.
Jesuits established a large number of astronomical, geophysical and meteorological observatories during the 17th and 18th centuries and again during the 19th and 20th centuries throughout the world. The history of these observatories has never been published in a complete form. Many early European astronomical observatories were established in Jesuit colleges. During the 17th and 18th centuries Jesuits were the first western scientists to enter into contact with China and India. It was through them that western astronomy was first introduced in these countries. They made early astronomical observations in India and China and they directed for 150 years the Imperial Observatory of Beijing. In the 19th and 20th centuries a new set of observatories were established. Besides astronomy these now included meteorology and geophysics. Jesuits established some of the earliest observatories in Africa, South America and the Far East. Jesuit observatories constitute an often forgotten chapter of the history of these sciences.
This proceedings volume collects the stories of mathematicians and scientists who have spent and developed parts of their careers and life in countries other than those of their origin. The reasons may have been different in different periods but were often driven by political or economic circumstances: The lack of suitable employment opportunities in their home countries, adverse political systems, and wars have led to the emigration of scientists. The volume shows that these movements have played an important role in spreading scientific knowledge and have often changed the scientific landscape, tradition and future of studies and research fields. The book analyses in particular: aspects o...
Although there is a rich historiography on Enlightenment Tuscany in Italian as well as French and German, the principle Anglophone works are Eric Cochrane’s Tradition and Enlightenment in the Tuscan Academies (1961) and his Enlightenment Florence in the Forgotten Centuries (1973). It is high time to revisit the Tuscan Enlightenment. This volume brings together an international group of scholars with the goal of putting to rest the idea that Florence ceased to be interesting after the Renaissance. Indeed, it is partly the explicit dialogue between Renaissance and Enlightenment that makes eighteenth-century Tuscany so interesting. This enlightened age looked to the past. It began the Herculean project of collecting, editing, and publishing many of the manuscripts that today form the bedrock of any serious study of Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio, Machiavelli, Vasari, Galileo, and other Tuscan writers. This was an age of public libraries, projects of cultural restoration, and the emergence of the Uffizi as a public art gallery, complemented by a science museum in Peter Leopold’s reign whose relics can still be visited in the Museo Galileo and La Specola.