The Story of Western Science

by Susan Wise Bauer

FOUR Grains of Sand

  1. Malcolm Williams, Science and Social Science: An Introduction (Taylor & Francis, 2002), 11; Lewis Wolpert, The Unnatural Nature of Science (Harvard University Press, 1992), 35–36; Keith Devlin, The Language of Mathematics: Making the Invisible Visible (W. H. Freeman, 2000), 20.

  2. Kenneth S. Guthrie and David R. Fideler, The Pythagorean Sourcebook and Library: An Anthology of Ancient Writings Which Relate to Pythagoras and Pythagorean Philosophy (Phanes Press, 1987), 58.

  3. Richard Mankiewicz, The Story of Mathematics (Princeton University Press, 2000), 24.

  4. Guthrie and Fideler, Pythagorean Sourcebook, 60; Mankiewicz, Story of Mathematics, 24, 26; Devlin, Language of Mathematics, 21.

  5. Scholium to Euclid’s Elements, quoted in Richard J. Trudeau, The Non-Euclidean Revolution (Birkhäuser, 1987), 103.

  6. Plato, The Republic: The Complete and Unabridged Jowett Translation (Vintage, 1991), 265, 279, 281.

  7. Margaret J. Osler, Reconfiguring the World: Nature, God, and Human Understanding from the Middle Ages to Early Modern Europe (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010), 13–14.

  8. Plato, Republic, 280.

  9. Guthrie and Fideler, Pythagorean Sourcebook, 178; Carl Huffman, Archytas of Tarentum: Pythagorean, Philosopher and Mathematician King (Cambridge University Press, 2005), 303–4; Aristotle, Politics, trans. Ernest Barker, Oxford World’s Classics (Oxford University Press, 1988), 311.

  10. Devlin, Language of Mathematics, 300.

  11. Euclid, The Thirteen Books of the Elements, 2nd ed., trans. Thomas L. Heath (Cambridge University Press, 1908), 1.

  12. Vitruvius Pollio, Vitruvius: The Ten Books on Architecture, trans. M. H. Morgan (Dover, 1960), 254; Mary Jaeger, Archimedes and the Roman Imagination (University of Michigan Press, 2008), 19.

  13. Keith Kendig, Sink or Float: Thought Problems in Math and Physics (Mathematical Association of Virginia, 2008), 67.

  14. Archimedes, “The Sand-Reckoner,” in The Works of Archimedes, trans. Thomas. L. Heath (Cambridge University Press, 1897), 221–22.

  15. Alan W. Hirshfeld, Parallax: The Race to Measure the Cosmos (Birkhäuser, 2000), 12, 14–15.

  16. George Coyne and Michael Heller, A Comprehensible Universe (Springer, 2008), 22–24; Charles Seife, Zero: The Biography of a Dangerous Idea (Viking, 2000), pp. 51–52.

  FIVE The Void

  1. C. C. W. Taylor, The Atomists: Leucippus and Democritus, Fragments (University of Toronto Press, 1999), 60.

  2. Epicurus, “Letter to Herodotus,” in Letters and Sayings of Epicurus, trans. Odysseus Makridis (Barnes & Noble, 2005), 3–6.

  3. Anthony Gottlieb, The Dream of Reason: A History of Philosophy from the Greeks to the Renaissance (W. W. Norton, 2000), 290, 303.

  4. George Sarton, A History of Science: Ancient Science through the Golden Age of Greece (Harvard University Press, 1964), 495; Lucretius, On the Nature of the Universe, trans. Ronald Melville (Oxford University Press, 1997), xvii.

  5. Lucretius, On the Nature of the Universe, rev. sub. ed., trans. Ronald E. Latham (Penguin Classics, 1994), 13–14.

  6. Titus Lucretius Carus, On the Nature of Things, trans. John Selby Watson (Henry G. Bohn, 1851), 96.

  SIX The Earth-Centered Universe

  1. K. P. Moesgaard, “Astronomy,” in Companion Encyclopedia of the History & Philosophy of the Mathematical Sciences, ed. I. Grattan-Guinness (Routledge, 1994), 241–42; Margaret J. Osler, Reconfiguring the World: Nature, God, and Human Understanding from the Middle Ages to Early Modern Europe (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010), 16.

  2. Norriss S. Hetherington, Cosmology: Historical, Literary, Philosophical, Religious, and Scientific Perspectives (CRC Press, 1993), 74–76.

  3. Osler, Reconfiguring the World, 15.

  4. C. M. Linton, From Eudoxus to Einstein: A History of Mathematical Astronomy (Cambridge University Press, 2008), 48.

  5. H. Floris Cohen, How Modern Science Came into the World: Four Civilizations, One 17th-Century Breakthrough (Amsterdam University Press, 2010), 53.

  6. Moesgaard, “Astronomy,” 243–45; Cohen, How Modern Science Came, 56.

  7. David C. Lindberg, The Beginnings of Western Science, 2nd ed. (University of Chicago Press, 2007), 249.

  8. Olaf Pedersen, A Survey of the Almagest, rev. ed. (Springer, 2011), 19; Linton, From Eudoxus to Einstein, 117; Albert van Helden, Measuring the Universe: Cosmic Dimensions from Aristarchus to Halley (University of Chicago Press, 1985), 171.

  9. Lynn Thorndike, A History of Magic and Experimental Science (Columbia University Press, 1941), 5:332.

  SEVEN The Last Ancient Astronomer

  1. H. Floris Cohen, How Modern Science Came into the World: Four Civilizations, One 17th-Century Breakthrough (Amsterdam University Press, 2010), 106.

  2. “Preface,” in De revolutionibus, quoted in Thomas S. Kuhn, The Copernican Revolution: Planetary Astronomy in the Development of Western Thought (Harvard University Press, 1957), 137.

  3. Jack Repcheck, Copernicus’ Secret: How the Scientific Revolution Began (Simon & Schuster, 2007), 48.

  4. Nicolaus Copernicus, Three Copernican Treatises, trans. Edward Rosen (Dover, 1959), 57.

  5. Ibid., 58–59.

  6. Kuhn, Copernican Revolution, 140.

  7. Cohen, How Modern Science Came, 106; C. M. Linton, From Eudoxus to Einstein: A History of Mathematical Astronomy (Cambridge University Press, 2008), 121, 126.

  8. Maurice A. Finocchiaro, Defending Copernicus and Galileo: Critical Reasoning in the Two Affairs (Springer, 2010), xiv.

  9. Quoted in Linton, From Eudoxus to Einstein, 126–27.

  10. Wim Verbaal, Yanick Maes, and Jan Papy, eds., Latinitas perennis, vol. 1, The Continuity of Latin Literature (Brill, 2007), 133; Nicolaus Copernicus, On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres, trans. Charles Glenn Wallis (Prometheus Books, 1995), 6.

  11. Copernicus, On the Revolutions, 18.

  EIGHT A New Proposal

  1. Tycho Brahe, quoted in Joshua Gilder and Anne-Lee Gilder, Heavenly Intrigue: Johannes Kepler, Tycho Brahe, and the Murder behind One of History’s Greatest Scientific Discoveries (Random House, 2004), 81.

  2. Catherine Drinker Bowen, Francis Bacon: The Temper of a Man (Little, Brown, 1963), 100–102.

  3. Brian Vickers, ed., Francis Bacon: The Major Works (Oxford University Press, 2002), xviii.

  4. Francis Bacon, The Philosophical Works of Francis Bacon in Five Volumes, ed. James Spedding (Longman, 1861), 4:65.

  5. Ibid., 81.

  6. Jennifer Mensch, Kant’s Organicism: Epigenesis and the Development of Critical Philosophy (University of Chicago Press, 2013), 147.

  7. Bowen, Francis Bacon, 187.

  8. Abraham Cowley and Thomas Sprat, The Works of Mr. Abraham Cowley: Consisting of Those Which Were Formerly Printed, and Those Which He Design’d for the Press, Now Published Out of the Authors Original Copies (London: Printed by J. M. for Henry Herringman, 1668), 39–40.

  9. Macvey Napier, Lord Bacon and Sir Walter Raleigh (Macmillan, 1853), 18.

  NINE Demonstration

  1. D’Arcy Power, Masters of Medicine: William Harvey (T. Fisher Unwin, 1897), 49, 58.

  2. Effie Bendann, Death Customs: An Analytical Study of Burial Rites (Routledge, 2010), 48–49; James Longrigg, Greek Rational Medicine: Philosophy and Medicine from Alcmaeon to the Alexandrians (Routledge, 1993), 184–85.

  3. Roy Porter, The Cambridge Illustrated History of Medicine (Cambridge University Press, 1988), 75, 157; Lawrence I. Conrad et al., The Western Medical Tradition: 800 B.C.–1800 A.D. (Cambridge University Press, 1995), 147.

  4. Charles Singer and C. Rabin, A Prelude to Modern Science (Cambridge University Press, 1946), xxxiii; Conrad et al., Western Medical Tradition, 275–77; Charles Donald O’Malley, Andreas Vesalius of Brussels, 1514–1564 (University of California Press, 1964), 117.

  5. Andreas Vesalius, On the Fabric of the Human Body. Book VI, The Heart and Associated Organs. Book VII, The Brain: A Translation of De humani corporis
fabicra libri septem, trans. William Frank Richardson and John Burd Carman (Norman, 2009), 83.

  6. Power, Masters of Medicine, 55–56.

  7. Robert C. Olby et al., eds., Companion to the History of Modern Science (Routledge, 1990), 569–70; Lois N. Magner, A History of the Life Sciences, 3rd ed. (Marcel Dekker, 2002), 83.

  8. Magner, History of the Life Sciences, 91; Power, Masters of Medicine, 149.

  9. John G. Simmons, Doctors and Discoveries: Lives That Created Today’s Medicine (Houghton Mifflin, 2002), 48.

  10. Catherine Drinker Bowen, Francis Bacon: The Temper of a Man (Little, Brown, 1963), 14.

  11. Power, Masters of Medicine, 231.

  TEN The Death of Aristotle

  1. Giorgio de Santillana, The Crime of Galileo (University of Chicago Press, 1955), 3.

  2. John Joseph Fahie, Galileo: His Life and Work (J. Murray, 1903), 27.

  3. Stillman Drake, Galileo at Work: His Scientific Biography (Dover, 1978), 2, 473.

  4. Ibid., 21–22.

  5. Galileo Galilei, Dialogue concerning the Two Chief World Systems, Ptolemaic and Copernican, trans. Stillman Drake, ed. Stephen Jay Gould (Modern Library, 2001), 125.

  6. David Leverington, Babylon to Voyager and Beyond: A History of Planetary Astronomy (Cambridge University Press, 2003), 70.

  7. William Cecil Dampier and Margaret Dampier, eds., Cambridge Readings in the Literature of Science; Being Extracts from the Writings of Men of Science to Illustrate the Development of Scientific Thought (Cambridge University Press, 1928), 15.

  8. Maurice A. Finocchiaro, Defending Copernicus and Galileo: Critical Reasoning in the Two Affairs (Springer, 2010), xv; Dampier and Dampier, Cambridge Readings, 26–27, 30; Leverington, Babylon to Voyager, 83.

  9. David Deming, Science and Technology in World History (McFarland, 2010), 3:165.

  10. Galilei, Dialogue, 130–31.

  11. Galileo Galilei and Maurice A. Finocchiaro, The Essential Galileo (Hackett, 2008), 146.

  12. Ibid., 147.

  13. Galilei, Dialogue, xvi, 5, 538.

  14. Deming, Science and Technology, 177–78.

  ELEVEN Instruments and Helps

  1. Thomas Birch, “The Life of the Honourable Robert Boyle,” in Robert Boyle, The Philosophical Works of the Honourable Robert Boyle in Six Volumes (J. & F. Rivington, 1772), 1:xxiv.

  2. Robert Boyle, “A Free Inquiry into the Vulgar Notion of Nature,” in The Philosophical Works of the Honourable Robert Boyle (W. & J. Innys, 1725), 2:115.

  3. Untitled column, Journal of the Optical Society of America and Review of Scientific Instruments 6, no. 6 (August 1922): 835–36; Matteo Valleriani, Galileo Engineer (Springer, 2010), 56–57.

  4. Marie Boas Hall, Robert Boyle and Seventeenth-Century Chemistry (Cambridge University Press, 1958), 20.

  5. Robert Boyle, The Sceptical Chymist (Dover, 2003), 15; Thomas L. Hankins and Robert J. Silverman, Instruments and the Imagination (Princeton University Press, 1995), 3.

  6. Trevor H. Levere, Transforming Matter: A History of Chemistry from Alchemy to the Buckyball (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001), 14.

  7. Birch, “Life of the Honourable Robert Boyle,” xxxiv.

  8. Hall, Robert Boyle, 6; Charles Webster, ed., The Intellectual Revolution of the Seventeenth Century (Routledge, 2011), 236–37.

  9. Edward Grant, A Source Book in Medieval Science (Harvard University Press, 1974), 324, 326.

  10. Boyle, Philosophical Works (1772), 1:11.

  11. Boyle, Philosophical Works (1725), 2:510–32; Boyle, Philosophical Works (1772), 1:11–12.

  12. James Riddick Partington, A Short History of Chemistry, 3rd ed. (Dover, 2011), 22–23.

  13. Partington, Short History of Chemistry, 29, 36; Levere, Transforming Matter, 7–8.

  14. Robert Boyle, A Free Enquiry into the Vulgarly Received Notion of Nature, ed. Edward B. Davis and Michael Hunter (Cambridge University Press, 1996), 114–15.

  15. Boyle, Philosophical Works (1725), 3:391.

  16. Boyle, Sceptical Chymist, 17.

  17. Michael Hunter, ed., Robert Boyle Reconsidered (Cambridge University Press, 2003), 61; Boyle, Sceptical Chymist, 3.

  18. Hunter, Robert Boyle Reconsidered, 72.

  19. Robert D. Purrington, The First Professional Scientist: Robert Hooke and the Royal Society of London (Birkhäuser, 2009), 34.

  20. Margaret ’Espinasse, Robert Hooke (University of California Press, 1962), 43–44.

  21. Thomas Birch, The History of the Royal Society of London (A. Millar, 1757), 3:344–45.

  22. David Freedberg, The Eye of the Lynx: Galileo, His Friends and the Beginnings of Natural History (University of Chicago Press, 2002), 180.

  23. Robert Hooke, “Preface,” in Micrographia (James Allestry, 1664).

  24. Thomas Birch, The History of the Royal Society of London (A. Millar, 1756), 1:215ff.

  25. Ibid., 262.

  26. Hooke, Micrographia, Observation 9.

  27. Ibid., Preface.

  28. Lawrence Principe, “In Retrospect: The Sceptical Chymist,” Nature 469 (January 6, 2011): 30.

  TWELVE Rules of Reasoning

  1. Thomas Birch, The History of the Royal Society of London (A. Millar, 1756), 2:501.

  2. Thomas Birch, The History of the Royal Society of London (A. Millar, 1757), 3:1,10.

  3. Ibid., 5, 14, 50.

  4. Ibid., 269; Charles Hutton, George Shaw, and Richard Pearson, The Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London (C. & R. Baldwin, 1809), 2:341; Adrian Johns, “Reading and Experiment in the Early Royal Society,” in Reading, Society, and Politics in Early Modern England, ed. Kevin Sharpe and Stephen Zwicker (Cambridge University Press, 2003), 260–61.

  5. Peter Machamer, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Galileo (Cambridge University Press, 1998), 153–54.

  6. I. Bernard Cohen, Revolution in Science (Harvard University Press, 1985), 163–70.

  7. Ron Larson and Bruce Edwards, Calculus (Cengage Learning, 2013), 42.

  8. James L. Axtell, “Locke, Newton and the Two Cultures,” in John Locke: Problems and Perspectives, ed. John W. Yolton (Cambridge University Press, 1969), 166–68.

  9. Barry Gower, Scientific Method: A Historical and Philosophical Introduction (Routledge, 1997), 69.

  10. Isaac Newton, The Principia: Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy, trans. I. Bernard Cohen and Anne Whitman (University of California Press, 1999), 942.

  11. Ibid., 943.

  THIRTEEN The Genesis of Geology

  1. James Oliver Thomson, History of Ancient Geography (Biblo & Tannen, 1965), 124ff, 342–43; Duane W. Roller, ed. and trans., Eratosthenes’ Geography (Princeton University Press, 2010), 161, 263–64.

  2. Gian Battista Vai and W. G. E. Caldwell, eds., The Origins of Geology in Italy (Geological Society of America, 2006), 158; Gary D. Rosenberg, The Revolution in Geology from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment (Geological Society of America, 2010), 143–44.

  3. Charles R. Van Hise, “The Problems of Geology,” Journal of Geology 12, no. 7 (1904): 589–91.

  4. G. Brent Dalrymple, The Age of the Earth (Stanford University Press, 1991), 21; James Ussher, Annals of the World (E. Tyler, 1658), 17.

  5. William H. Stiebing, Ancient Astronauts, Cosmic Collisions and Other Popular Theories (Prometheus Books, 1984), 5.

  6. Rosenberg, Revolution in Geology, 144–45.

  7. Isaac Newton, Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy, trans. Andrew Motte (Daniel Adee, 1848), 486.

  8. Dalrymple, Age of the Earth, 28–29.

  9. Benoît de Maillet, Telliamed, or, The World Explain’d (W. Pechin, 1797), 194–95; Dalrymple, Age of the Earth, 25–29.

  10. John R. Gribbin, The Scientists: A History of Science Told through the Lives of Its Greatest Inventors (Random House, 2003), 221–23.

  11. Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon, Natural History, General and Particular, 2nd ed., trans. William Smellie (W. Strahan and T. Cadell, 1785), 1:1.

  12
. William Whiston, A New Theory of the Earth, from Its Original, to the Consummation of All Things, 5th ed. (John Whiston, 1737), 373; David Spadafora, The Idea of Progress in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Yale University Press, 1990), 112–13.

  13. Buffon, Natural History, 1:33–34.

  14. Dalrymple, Age of the Earth, 29–30.

  15. Jacques Roger, Buffon: A Life in Natural History, trans. Sarah Lucille Bonnefoi (Cornell University Press, 1997), 187–93.

  16. Buffon, Natural History, 1:258.

  17. Henry Gee, In Search of Deep Time: Beyond the Fossil Record to a New History of Life (Cornell University Press, 2001), 2–4.

  FOURTEEN The Laws of the New Science

  1. Dennis R. Dean, James Hutton and the History of Geology (Cornell University Press, 1992), 1–3; John Playfair, The Works of John Playfair, Esq. (Archibald Constable, 1822), 4:43–44.

  2. Playfair, Works, 46.

  3. Gian Battista Vai and W. G. E. Caldwell, eds., The Origins of Geology in Italy (Geological Society of America, 2006), 59–61: Martin J. S. Rudwick, Bursting the Limits of Time: The Reconstruction of Geohistory in the Age of Revolution (University of Chicago Press, 2005), 135.

  4. Playfair, Works, 12.

  5. Ibid., 49–50.

  6. Dean, James Hutton, 17, 24–25.

  7. Charles R. Van Hise, “The Problems of Geology,” Journal of Geology 12, no. 7 (1904): 614–15.

  8. James Hutton, “Theory of the Earth,” Transactions of the Royal Society of Edinburgh 1 (1788): 301.

  9. Ibid., 304.

  10. Playfair, Works, 63–64.

  11. Dean, James Hutton, 18, 154.

  12. Ibid., 18; J. E. O’Rourke, “A Comparison of James Hutton’s Principles of Knowledge and Theory of the Earth,” Isis 69, no. 1 (March 1978): 19.

  13. Jack Repcheck, The Man Who Found Time: James Hutton and the Discovery of Earth’s Antiquity (Perseus, 2003), 160–61.

  14. Martin J. S. Rudwick, The Meaning of Fossils: Episodes in the History of Palaeontology, 2nd ed. (University of Chicago Press, 1985), 104; Claudine Cohen, The Fate of the Mammoth: Fossils, Myth, and History, trans. William Rodarmor (University of Chicago Press, 2002), 106–8; John Reader, Missing Links: In Search of Human Origins (Oxford University Press, 2011), 45.

  15. Martin J. S. Rudwick, Georges Cuvier, Fossil Bones, and Geological Catastrophes: New Translations & Interpretations of the Primary Texts (University of Chicago Press, 1997), 21; C. L. E. Lewis and S. J. Knell, The Making of the Geological Society of London (Geological Society Publishing House, 2009), 77–78.