This book reevaluates the changes to chemistry that took place from 1660 to 1730 through a close study of the chymist Wilhelm Homberg (1653-1715) and the changing fortunes of his discipline at the Academie Royale des Sciences, France's official scien...

The Victorians, perhaps more than any Britons before them, were diggers and sifters of the past. Though they were not the first to be fascinated by history, the intensity and range of Victorian preoccupations with the past was unprecedented and of la...

If the twentieth century saw the rise of "Big Science", then the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were surely an age of thrift. As Simon Werrett's new history shows, frugal early modern experimenters transformed their homes into laboratories as t...

Does science aim at providing an account of the world that is literally true or objectively true? Understanding the difference requires paying close attention to metaphor and its role in science. In "The Third Lens", Andrew S. Reynolds argues that me...

The conflict between science and religion seems indelible, even eternal. Surely two such divergent views of the universe have always been in fierce opposition? Actually, that's not the case, says Peter Harrison: our very concepts of science and relig...

Duhem's 1908 essay questions the relation between physical theory and metaphysics and, more specifically, between astronomy and physics-an issue still of importance today. He critiques the answers given by Greek thought, Arabic science, medieval Chri...

In science and technology, the images used to depict ideas, data, and reactions can be as striking and explosive as the concepts and processes they embody – both works of art and generative forces in their own right. Drawing on a close dialogue betwe...

Drawing on primary source material and interviews with statisticians and other scientists, "The Theory That Would Not Die" is the riveting account of how a seemingly simple theorem ignited one of the greatest scientific controversies of all time. Bay...

In the late fifteenth century, clocks acquired minute hands. A century later, second hands appeared. But it wasn't until the 1850s that instruments could recognize a tenth of a second, and, once they did, the impact on modern science and society was...