To Explain the World: The Discovery of Modern Science

by Steven Weinberg

  6. Aristotle, Meteorology, Book III, Chapter 4, 374a, 30–31 (Oxford trans., p. 603).

  7. Descartes, Principles of Philosophy, trans. V. R. Miller and R. P. Miller, pp. 60, 114.

  8. On this point, see Peter Dear, Revolutionizing the Sciences—European Knowledge and Its Ambitions, 1500–1700, 2nd ed. (Princeton University Press, Princeton, N.J., and Oxford, 2009), Chapter 8.

  9. L. Laudan, “The Clock Metaphor and Probabilism: The Impact of Descartes on English Methodological Thought,” Annals of Science 22, 73 (1966). Contrary conclusions were reached in G. A. J. Rogers, “Descartes and the Method of English Science,” Annals of Science 29, 237 (1972).

  10. Richard Watson, Cogito Ergo Sum—The Life of René Descartes (David R. Godine, Boston, Mass., 2002).

  14. The Newtonian Synthesis

  1. This is described in D. T. Whiteside, ed., General Introduction to Volume 20, The Mathematical Papers of Isaac Newton (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1968), pp. xi–xii.

  2. Ibid., Volume 2, footnote, pp. 206–7; and Volume 3, pp. 6–7.

  3. See, for example, Richard S. Westfall, Never at Rest—A Biography of Isaac Newton (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1980), Chapter 14.

  4. Peter Galison, How Experiments End (University of Chicago Press, Chicago, Ill., 1987).

  5. Quoted in Westfall, Never at Rest, p. 143.

  6. Quoted in Dictionary of Scientific Biography, ed. Charles Coulston Gillespie (Scribner, New York, 1970), Volume 6, p. 485.

  7. Quoted in James Gleick, Isaac Newton (Pantheon, New York, 2003), p. 120.

  8. Quotations from I. Bernard Cohen and Anne Whitman, trans., Isaac Newton—The Principia, 3rd ed. (University of California Press, Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1999). Before this version, the standard translation was The Principia—Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy (University of California Press, Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1962), trans. Florian Cajori (1792), rev. trans. Andrew Motte.

  9. G. E. Smith, “Newton’s Study of Fluid Mechanics,” International Journal of Engineering Science 36, 1377 (1998).

  10. Modern astronomical data in this chapter are from C. W. Allen, Astrophysical Quantities, 2nd ed. (Athlone, London, 1963).

  11. The standard work on the history of the measurement of the size of the solar system is Albert van Helden, Measuring the Universe—Cosmic Dimensions from Aristarchus to Halley (University of Chicago Press, Chicago, Ill., 1985).

  12. See Robert P. Crease, World in the Balance—The Historic Quest for an Absolute System of Measurement (W. W. Norton, New York, 2011).

  13. See J. Z. Buchwald and M. Feingold, Newton and the Origin of Civilization (Princeton University Press, Princeton, N.J., 2014).

  14. See S. Chandrasekhar, Newton’s Principia for the Common Reader (Clarendon, Oxford, 1995), pp. 472–76; Westfall, Never at Rest, pp. 736–39.

  15. R. S. Westfall, “Newton and the Fudge Factor,” Science 179, 751 (1973).

  16. See G. E. Smith, “How Newton’s Principia Changed Physics,” in Interpreting Newton: Critical Essays, ed. A. Janiak and E. Schliesser (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2012), pp. 360–95.

  17. Voltaire, Philosophical Letters, trans. E. Dilworth (Bobbs-Merrill Educational Publishing, Indianapolis, Ind., 1961), p. 61.

  18. The opposition to Newtonianism is described in articles by A. B. Hall, E. A. Fellmann, and P. Casini in “Newton’s Principia: A Discussion Organized and Edited by D. G. King-Hele and A. R. Hall,” Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society 42, 1 (1988).

  19. Christiaan Huygens, Discours de la Cause de la Pesanteur (1690), trans. Karen Bailey, with annotations by Karen Bailey and G. E. Smith, available from Smith at Tufts University (1997).

  20. Shapin has argued that this conflict even had political implications: Steven Shapin, “Of Gods and Kings: Natural Philosophy and Politics in the Leibniz-Clarke Disputes,” Isis 72, 187 (1981).

  21. S. Weinberg, Gravitation and Cosmology (Wiley, New York, 1972), Chapter 15.

  22. G. E. Smith, to be published.

  23. Quoted in A Random Walk in Science, ed. R. L. Weber and E. Mendoza (Taylor and Francis, London, 2000).

  24. Robert K. Merton, “Motive Forces of the New Science,” Osiris 4, Part 2 (1938); reprinted in Science, Technology, and Society in Seventeenth-Century England (Howard Fertig, New York, 1970), and in On Social Structure and Science, ed. Piotry Sztompka (University of Chicago Press, Chicago, Ill., 1996), pp. 223–40.

  15. Epilogue: The Grand Reduction

  1. I have given a more detailed account of some of this progress in The Discovery of Subatomic Particles, rev. ed. (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2003).

  2. Isaac Newton, Opticks, or A Treatise of the Reflections, Refractions, Inflections, and Colours of Light (Dover, New York, 1952, based on 4th ed., London, 1730), p. 394.

  3. Ibid., p. 376.

  4. This is from Ostwald’s Outlines of General Chemistry, and is quoted by G. Holton, in Historical Studies in the Physical Sciences 9, 161 (1979), and I. B. Cohen, in Critical Problems in the History of Science, ed. M. Clagett (University of Wisconsin Press, Madison, 1959).

  5. P. A. M. Dirac, “Quantum Mechanics of Many-Electron Systems,” Proceedings of the Royal Society A123, 713 (1929).

  6. To forestall accusations of plagiarism, I will acknowledge here that this last paragraph is a riff on the last paragraph of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species.

  Bibliography

  This bibliography lists the modern secondary sources on the history of science on which I have relied, as well as original works of past scientists that I have consulted, from the fragments of the pre-Socratics to Newton’s Principia, and more sketchily on to the present. The works listed are all in English or English translations; unfortunately, I have no Latin and less Greek, let alone Arabic. This is not intended to be a list of the most authoritative sources, or of the best editions of each source. These are simply the books that I have consulted in writing To Explain the World, in the best editions that happened to be available to me.

  ORIGINAL SOURCES

  Archimedes, The Works of Archimedes, trans. T. L. Heath (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1897).

  Aristarchus, Aristarchus of Samos, trans. T. L. Heath (Clarendon, Oxford, 1923).

  Aristotle, The Complete Works of Aristotle—The Revised Oxford Translation, ed. J. Barnes (Princeton University Press, Princeton, N.J., 1984).

  Augustine, Confessions, trans. Albert Cook Outler (Westminster, Philadelphia, Pa., 1955).

  , Retractions, trans. M. I. Bogan (Catholic University of America Press, Washington, D.C., 1968).

  Cicero, On the Republic and On the Laws, trans. Clinton W. Keys (Loeb Classical Library, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass., 1928).

  Cleomedes, Lectures on Astronomy, ed. and trans. A. C. Bowen and R. B. Todd (University of California Press, Berkeley and Los Angeles, 2004).

  Copernicus, Nicolas Copernicus On the Revolutions, trans. Edward Rosen (Polish Scientific Publishers, Warsaw, 1978; reprint, Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, Md., 1978).

  , Copernicus—On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres, trans. A. M. Duncan (Barnes and Noble, New York, 1976).

  , Three Copernican Treatises, trans. E. Rosen (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York, 1939). Consists of Commentariolus, Letter Against Werner, and Narratio prima of Rheticus.

  Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, 6th ed. (John Murray, London, 1885).

  René Descartes, Discourse on Method, Optics, Geometry, and Meteorology, trans. Paul J. Olscamp (Bobbs-Merrill, Indianapolis, Ind., 1965).

  , Principles of Philosophy, trans. V. R. Miller and R. P. Miller (D. Reidel, Dordrecht, 1983).

  Diogenes Laertius, Lives of the Eminent Philosophers, trans. R. D. Hicks (Loeb Classical Library, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass., 1972).

  Euclid, The Thirteen Books of the Elements, 2nd ed., trans. Thomas L. Heath (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1925).
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  Galileo Galilei, Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems: Ptolemaic and Copernican, trans. Stillman Drake (Modern Library, New York, 2001).

  , Discourse on Bodies in Water, trans. Thomas Salusbury (University of Illinois Press, Urbana, 1960).

  , Discoveries and Opinions of Galileo, trans. Stillman Drake (Anchor, New York, 1957). Contains The Starry Messenger, Letter to Christina, and excerpts from Letters on Sunspots and The Assayer.

  , The Essential Galileo, trans. Maurice A. Finocchiaro (Hackett, Indianapolis, Ind., 2008). Includes The Sidereal Messenger, Letter to Castelli, Letter to Christina, Reply to Cardinal Bellarmine, etc.

  , Siderius Nuncius, or The Sidereal Messenger, trans. Albert van Helden (University of Chicago Press, Chicago, Ill., 1989).

  , Two New Sciences, Including Centers of Gravity and Force of Percussion, trans. Stillman Drake (University of Wisconsin Press, Madison, 1974).

  Galileo Galilei and Christoph Scheiner, On Sunspots, trans. and ed. Albert van Helden and Eileen Reeves (University of Chicago Press, Chicago, Ill., 1010).

  Abu Hamid al-Ghazali, The Beginnings of Sciences, trans. I. Goldheizer, in Studies on Islam, ed. Merlin L. Swartz (Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1981).

  , The Incoherence of the Philosophers, trans. Sabih Ahmad Kamali (Pakistan Philosophical Congress, Lahore, 1958).

  Herodotus, The Histories, trans. Aubery de Selincourt, rev. ed. (Penguin Classics, London, 2003).

  Homer, The Iliad, trans. Richmond Lattimore (University of Chicago Press, Chicago, Ill., 1951).

  , The Odyssey, trans. Robert Fitzgerald (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York, 1961).

  Horace, Odes and Epodes, trans. Niall Rudd (Loeb Classical Library, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass., 2004).

  Christiaan Huygens, The Pendulum Clock or Geometrical Demonstrations Concerning the Motion of Pendula as Applied to Clocks, trans. Richard J. Blackwell (Iowa State University Press, Ames, 1986).

  , Treatise on Light, trans. Silvanus P. Thompson (University of Chicago Press, Chicago, Ill., 1945).

  Johannes Kepler, Epitome of Copernican Astronomy and Harmonies of the World, trans. C. G. Wallis (Prometheus, Amherst, N.Y., 1995).

  , New Astronomy (Astronomia Nova), trans. W. H. Donahue (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1992).

  Omar Khayyam, The Rubáiyát, the Five Authorized Editions, trans. Edward Fitzgerald (Walter J. Black, New York, 1942).

  , The Rubáiyát, a Paraphrase from Several Literal Translations, by Richard Le Gallienne (John Lan, London, 1928).

  Lactantius, Divine Institutes, trans. A. Bowen and P. Garnsey (Liverpool University Press, Liverpool, 2003).

  Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, The Leibniz-Clarke Correspondence, ed. H. G. Alexander (Manchester University Press, Manchester, 1956).

  Martin Luther, Table Talk, trans. W. Hazlitt (H. G. Bohn, London, 1857).

  Moses ben Maimon, Guide to the Perplexed, trans. M. Friedländer, 2nd ed. (Routledge, London, 1919).

  Isaac Newton, The Mathematical Papers of Isaac Newton, ed. D. Thomas Whiteside (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1968).

  , Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy, trans. Florian Cajori, rev. trans. Andrew Motte (University of California Press, Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1962).

  , Opticks, or a Treatise of the Reflections, Refractions, Inflections, and Colours of Light (Dover, New York, 1952, based on 4th ed., London, 1730).

  , The Principia—Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy, trans. I. Bernard Cohen and Anne Whitman, with “A Guide to Newton’s Principia,” by I. Bernard Cohen (University of California Press, Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1999).

  Nicole Oresme, The Book of the Heavens and the Earth, trans. A. D. Menut and A. J. Denomy (University of Wisconsin Press, Madison, 1968).

  Philo, The Works of Philo, trans. C. D. Yonge (Hendrickson, Peabody, Mass., 1993).

  Plato, Phaedo, trans. Alexander Nehamas and Paul Woodruff (Hackett, Indianapolis, Ind., 1995).

  , Plato, Volume 9 (Loeb Classical Library, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass., 1929). Includes Phaedo, etc.

  , Republic, trans. Robin Wakefield (Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1993).

  , Timaeus and Critias, trans. Desmond Lee (Penguin, New York, 1965).

  , The Works of Plato, trans. Benjamin Jowett (Modern Library, New York, 1928). Includes Phaedo, Republic, Theaetetus, etc.

  Ptolemy, Almagest, trans. G. J. Toomer (Duckworth, London, 1984).

  , Optics, trans. A. Mark Smith, in “Ptolemy’s Theory of Visual Perception—An English Translation of the Optics with Commentary,” Transactions of the American Philosophical Society 86, Part 2 (1996).

  Simplicius, On Aristotle “On the Heavens 2.10–14,” trans. I. Mueller (Cornell University Press, Ithaca, N.Y., 2005).

  , On Aristotle “On the Heavens 3.1–7,” trans. I. Mueller (Cornell University Press, Ithaca, N.Y., 2005).

  , On Aristotle “Physics 2,” trans. Barrie Fleet (Duckworth, London, 1997).

  Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War, trans. Rex Warner (Penguin, New York, 1954, 1972).

  COLLECTIONS OF ORIGINAL SOURCES

  J. Barnes, Early Greek Philosophy (Penguin, London, 1987).

  , The Presocratic Philosophers, rev. ed. (Routledge and Kegan Paul, London, 1982).

  J. Lennart Berggren, “Mathematics in Medieval Islam,” in The Mathematics of Egypt, Mesopotamia, China, India, and Islam, ed. Victor Katz (Princeton University Press, Princeton, N.J., 2007).

  Marshall Clagett, The Science of Mechanics in the Middle Ages (University of Wisconsin Press, Madison, 1959).

  M. R. Cohen and I. E. Drabkin, A Source Book in Greek Science (Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass., 1948).

  Stillman Drake and I. E. Drabkin, Mechanics in Sixteenth-Century Italy (University of Wisconsin Press, Madison, 1969).

  Stillman Drake and C. D. O’Malley, The Controversy on the Comets of 1618 (University of Pennsylvania Press, Philadelphia, 1960). Translations of works of Galileo, Grassi, and Kepler.

  K. Freeman, The Ancilla to the Pre-Socratic Philosophers (Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass., 1966).

  D. W. Graham, The Texts of Early Greek Philosophy—The Complete Fragments and Selected Testimonies of the Major Presocratics (Cambridge University Press, New York, 2010).

  E. Grant, ed., A Source Book in Medieval Science (Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass., 1974).

  T. L. Heath, Greek Astronomy (J. M. Dent and Sons, London, 1932).

  G. L. Ibry-Massie and P. T. Keyser, Greek Science of the Hellenistic Era (Routledge, London, 2002).

  William Francis Magie, A Source Book in Physics (McGraw-Hill, New York, 1935).

  Michael Matthews, The Scientific Background to Modern Philosophy (Hackett, Indianapolis, Ind., 1989).

  Merlin L. Swartz, Studies in Islam (Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1981).

  SECONDARY SOURCES

  L’Anno Galileiano, International Symposium a cura dell’Universita di Padova, 2–6 dicembre 1992, Volume 1 (Edizioni LINT, Trieste, 1995). Speeches in English by T. Kuhn and S. Weinberg; see also Tribute to Galileo.

  J. Barnes, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Aristotle (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1995). Articles by J. Barnes, R. J. Hankinson, and others.

  Herbert Butterfield, The Origins of Modern Science, rev. ed. (Free Press, New York, 1957).

  S. Chandrasekhar, Newton’s Principia for the Common Reader (Clarendon, Oxford, 1995).

  R. Christianson, Tycho’s Island (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2000).

  Carlo M. Cipolla, Clocks and Culture 1300–1700 (W. W. Norton, New York, 1978).

  Marshall Clagett, ed., Critical Studies in the History of Science (University of Wisconsin Press, Madison, 1959). Articles by I. B. Cohen and others.

  H. Floris Cohen, How Modern Science Came into the World—Four Civilizations, One 17th-Century Breakthrough (Amsterdam University Press, Amsterdam, 2010).

  John Craig, Newton at the Mint (Cambri
dge University Press, Cambridge, 1946).

  Robert P. Crease, World in the Balance—The Historic Quest for an Absolute System of Measurement (W. W. Norton, New York, 2011).

  A. C. Crombie, Medieval and Early Modern Science (Doubleday Anchor, Garden City, N.Y., 1959).

  , Robert Grosseteste and the Origins of Experimental Science—1100–1700 (Clarendon, Oxford, 1953).

  Olivier Darrigol, A History of Optics from Greek Antiquity to the Nineteenth Century (Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2012).

  Peter Dear, Revolutionizing the Sciences—European Knowledge and Its Ambitions, 1500–1700, 2nd ed. (Princeton University Press, Princeton, N.J., and Oxford, 2009).

  D. R. Dicks, Early Greek Astronomy to Aristotle (Cornell University Press, Ithaca, N.Y., 1970).

  The Dictionary of Scientific Biography, ed. Charles Coulston Gillespie (Scribner, New York, 1970).

  Stillman Drake, Galileo at Work—His Scientific Biography (University of Chicago Press, Chicago, Ill., 1978).

  Pierre Duhem, The Aim and Structure of Physical Theory, trans. Philip K. Weiner (Athenaeum, New York, 1982).

  , Medieval Cosmology—Theories of Infinity, Place, Time, Void, and the Plurality of Worlds, trans. Roger Ariew (University of Chicago Press, Chicago, Ill., 1985).

  , To Save the Phenomena—An Essay on the Idea of Physical Theory from Plato to Galileo, trans. E. Dolan and C. Machler (University of Chicago Press, Chicago, Ill., 1969).

  James Evans, The History and Practice of Ancient Astronomy (Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1998).

  Annibale Fantoli, Galileo—For Copernicanism and for the Church, 2nd ed., trans. G. V. Coyne (University of Notre Dame Press, South Bend, Ind., 1996).

  Maurice A. Finocchiaro, Retrying Galileo, 1633–1992 (University of California Press, Berkeley and Los Angeles, 2005).

  E. M. Forster, Pharos and Pharillon (Knopf, New York, 1962).

  Kathleen Freeman, The Pre-Socratic Philosophers, 3rd ed. (Basil Blackwell, Oxford, 1953).