Anna Marie Roos. The Salt of the Earth: Natural Philosophy, Medicine, and Chymistry in England, 1650–1750. (History of Science and Medicine Library, 3.) xvi + 296 pp., figs., bibl., index. Leiden/Boston: Brill, 2007. $148 (cloth).

Isis ◽  
2009 ◽  
Vol 100 (1) ◽  
pp. 166-167
Author(s):  
Victor D. Boantza
Keyword(s):  
History Of Science ◽  
Natural Philosophy ◽  
The Earth ◽  
History Of

From the Evidence of History to the History of Evidence

2021 ◽  
pp. 70-98
Author(s):  
Stathis Psillos
Keyword(s):  
History Of Science ◽  
Scientific Realism ◽  
Research Program ◽  
Natural Philosophy ◽  
Pessimistic Induction ◽  
Scientific Theories ◽  
Universal Gravitation ◽  
History Of ◽  
Second Shift

This chapter looks into the transition from the Cartesian natural philosophy to the Newtonian one, and then to the Einsteinian science, making the following key point: though the shift from Descartes’s theory to Newton’s amounted to a wholesale rejection of Descartes’s theory, in the second shift, a great deal was retained; Newton’s theory of universal gravitation gave rise to a research program that informed and constrained Einstein’s theory. Newton’s theory was a lot more supported by the evidence than Descartes’s and this made it imperative for the successor theory to accommodate within it as much as possible of Newton’s theory: evidence for Newton’s theory became evidence for Einstein’s. This double case study motivates a rebranding of the “divide et impera” strategy against the pessimistic induction introduced in the book Scientific Realism, which shifts attention from the (crude) evidence of the history of science to the (refined) history of evidence for scientific theories.

scholarly journals THE CONCEPT OF INERTIA: AN INTERDISCIPLINARY APPROACH

2021 ◽  
Vol 20 (1) ◽  
pp. 4-9
Author(s):  
Paolo Bussotti
Keyword(s):  
High School ◽  
History Of Science ◽  
Natural Philosophy ◽  
Interdisciplinary Approach ◽  
School Level ◽  
Uniform Motion ◽  
High School Level ◽  
Daily Experiences ◽  
History Of ◽  
State Of Rest

“Every body perseveres in its state of rest, or of uniform motion in a right line, unless it is compelled to change that state by forces impressed thereon” (p. Newton 1846, p. 83). This is the famous first axiom or law of motion stated by Newton in his masterpiece The Mathematical principles of natural philosophy (ivi). Everywhere, in the courses of physics at the high school level the inertia principle is the first to be taught. However, there are many doubts that most of learners fully grasp its numerous and fundamental nuances, which are necessary for a satisfying introduction to physics. Therefore, I propose an interdisciplinary approach for the explanation of this principle in which history of science and analysis of the daily experiences are joined to offer a complete comprehension of the concept of inertia.

scholarly journals On the Biological Term “Gene” in the History of Science

ENDOXA ◽  
2017 ◽  
pp. 103
Author(s):  
Kurt Plischke ◽  
Alfons Labisch
Keyword(s):  
Nucleic Acid ◽  
History Of Science ◽  
20Th Century ◽  
19Th Century ◽  
Natural Philosophy ◽  
Early 20Th Century ◽  
Contemporary Philosophy ◽  
Biological Principle ◽  
History Of ◽  
The 19Th Century

Contemporary philosophy of science sets the origins of the predominantattributes of the term “gene” in the year 1900 when Gregor Mendel’s work was rediscovered. Yet it was the speculative biology of the second half of the 19th century that opened up the epistemic sphere for a new conception of heredity: heredity as the transmission of particulate, hereditable material units with a tendency for self-preservation. The then young discipline of biology dissociated its terminology from the preconceptions of natural philosophy. In the early 20th century, the postulated hereditary particles were associated with the chromosome and, at least in the 1940s, with nucleic acid: which was being stable and, at the same time, mutable, as well as capable of self-reproduction, self-selectivity, and memory. DNA epitomizes the perfect biological principle. But the most recent conception of the gene is not free from anthropomorphisms.

scholarly journals What Is the History of Science the History of? Early Modern Roots of the Ideology of Modern Science

2020 ◽  
Vol 30 (1) ◽  
pp. 29-62
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
History Of Science ◽  
18Th Century ◽  
Natural Philosophy ◽  
Practical Knowledge ◽  
Modern Science ◽  
Useful Knowledge ◽  
Natural Knowledge ◽  
History Of ◽  
The 19Th Century

The title of the article prompts at least two questions: (1) how to determine that any particular research topic or problem belongs to the history of science and (2) the effect of the history of science and other research in problematizing the very idea that science is a natural category. The category of “science” itself has become so historicized and slippery that it calls into question the integrity of what historians of science are engaged in. The thesis of the article is that the integrity of the history of science as a distinct field of scholarship may lie in understanding the antecedents to modern science as well as its ongoing development. The evident mismatch between the common representations of “science” and the miscellany of materials typically studied by a historian of science comes from a systematic ambiguity that may itself be traced back to early modern Europe. In that cultural setting, natural philosophy was held (most famously by Francis Bacon) to involve both contemplative and practical knowledge. The resulting tension and ambiguity are typified in the 18th century by Buffon’s views. The new enterprise that was called science in the 19th century arrived at an unstable ideology of natural knowledge that was heavily indebted to those early modern developments. The two complementary and competing elements in the ideology of modern science may be described as “natural philosophy” (a discourse of contemplative knowledge) and “instrumentality” (a discourse of practical or useful knowledge). The history of science in large part deals with the interrelations — always shifting and often repudiating each other — between those two poles.

AI and the Movies

2019 ◽  
pp. 63-96
Keyword(s):  
Artificial Intelligence ◽  
Science Fiction ◽  
History Of Science ◽  
The Moon ◽  
The Earth ◽  
History Of

The history of science fiction (SF) in the movies is reviewed in depth. At this point in the Big Moon Dig story series, an artificial intelligence (AI) is needed placed in the new settlement on the Moon. Designing electronics for operation in space is difficult and two major AIs on Earth support this design effort. The question of whether or not the Earth-bound AIs can be considered the parents of the space-based AI is a key point of discussion. The story in this chapter, “Caterpillars on the Moon,” features the landing of an inflatable habitat section on the Moon and its movement, caterpillar fashion, into position.

Making the Globe: A Cultural History of Science in the Bay of Bengal

2020 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
pp. 217-240
Author(s):  
Sujit Sivasundaram
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Big Data ◽  
Cultural History ◽  
History Of Science ◽  
Free Trade ◽  
Bay Of Bengal ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
The Earth ◽  
Imperial Expansion ◽  
History Of

Starting from Madras, travelling across the Bay of Bengal, to the coast of Sumatra and then to Singapore, this paper provides a cultural history of nineteenth-century knowledge-making as an enterprise in making and breaking three concepts: globe, empire and self. It does so by working outwards from early-nineteenth century pendulum-length experiments to determine the curvature of the Earth. It argues that moving across concepts and scales was vital to a regime of big data. Data-crunching involved different sciences and split across territories and sea and land. As the project of making the globe proceeded, for instance from Madras Observatory, imperial settlements could be located precisely as coordinates, for instance British Singapore, and indigenous intellectuals, like Abdullah bin Abdul Kadir (1797–1854), had to find their place in a world of imperial free trade. Global model-making brought about a detachment from individuals and locations as people and places were fixed on a globe and it led to the erasure of the indigenous informant, a key figure in recent histories of science. In linking the making of the globe to the fate of intermediary, the argument urges the need to place indigenous agency in the sciences within wider accounts of labour, capital and imperial expansion.

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