The World as We Know It
From Natural Philosophy to Modern Science
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- $34.99
Publisher Description
From the award-winning author of Revolutionizing the Sciences, a monumental historical account of how we came to see the world through the lens of science
Science is the basis of our assumptions about ourselves and our world, from ideas about our evolutionary past to our conceptions of the vast expanses of space and the smallest particles of matter. In this panoramic book, acclaimed historian of science Peter Dear uncovers the roots of such beliefs, revealing how they constitute a natural philosophy that has been developed and refined over the course of centuries—and how the world as we have come to know it was by no means inevitable.
In a sweeping, multifaceted narrative, Dear describes some of the most breathtaking accomplishments in the advance of human knowledge, such as Isaac Newton’s laws of motion and gravitation, Carl Linnaeus’s taxonomy, Antoine Lavoisier’s new chemistry, Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution, and Albert Einstein’s theories of relativity. Challenging the notion that science is only about “making discoveries,” he shows how our world has been formed by people, institutions, and cultural assumptions, giving rise to disciplines ranging from biology and astrophysics to electromagnetism and the social sciences.
Taking readers from the early eighteenth century to today, The World as We Know It reveals how our ideas about our place in the universe were bequeathed to us by individuals, cultures, and a curiosity that knows no bounds.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this mundane history, Dear (Revolutionizing the Sciences), a professor emeritus of history at Cornell University, unpacks the origins of major scientific achievements between the 17th and 20th centuries, arguing science is not a free-floating "'thing' waiting to be discovered" but rather an enterprise molded by people, culture, and institutions. Dear explains how the immediate success of Isaac Newton's writings about the laws of motion and gravitation was due to their religious value; soon after Newton's Principia was published in England in 1687, Anglican presbyters began citing it as proof of "God and His rule over Creation." Similarly, the system of classifying and naming organisms developed by Carl Linnaeus in the 18th century gained its hold, according to Dear, not only because it was easy to use but because both church and state saw that it reflected "God's blueprint for creation." Even Charles Darwin's controversial ideas on evolution won acceptance in Victorian society, not necessarily on their own merit, but because anthropologists could use them, erroneously, to show how far down the evolutionary ladder non-European folk were from their Victorian kin. Dear goes on to explore later milestones in thermodynamics, quantum mechanics, and astronomy. Unfortunately, his technical summaries are dry and sometimes stylistically awkward. Even with some interesting insights, this ends up reading like a rather bland expansion of the history prologues found in science textbooks. Illus.
