Nature Engaged [electronic resource] : Science in Practice from the Renaissance to the Present /
Biagioli, M.editor.
Riskin, J.editor.
This volume gathers essays that focus on the worldliness of science, its inseparable engagement in the major institutional bases of social life: law, market, church, school, and nation. With a chronological span reaching from the Renaissance to Big Science, its topics range from sundials to genetic sequences, from calculating instruments to devices that simulate human behavior, from early cartography to techniques for tracing radioactive fallout on a global scale. The book aims to show readers, with episodes drawn from the span of their modern history, the sciences in action throughout human society.
Cover; Title; Copyright; Dedication; Contents; List of Figures; Acknowledgments; Introduction: A Mingled Yarn; Part I Conventions; 1 Scientific Conventions: International Assemblies and Technical Standards from the Republic of Letters to Global Science; 2 Practicing Eighteenth-Century Science Today; 3 The Textbook Case of a Priority Dispute: D. I. Mendeleev, Lothar Meyer, and the Periodic System; 4 Complex Systems and Total War: British Operational Research and the PM Statistical Branch at the Beginning of World War II; Part II Laws
5 Witnessing Astronomy: Kepler on the Uses and Misuses of Testimony6 Improvement for Profit: Calculating Machines and the Prehistory of Intellectual Property; 7 Genes, Railroads, and Regulations: Intellectual Property and the Public Interest; 8 Epidemiology, Tort, and the Relations between Science and Law in the Twentieth-Century American Courtroom; Part III Histories; 9 Mercator Maps Time; 10 Rethinking 1633: Writing about Galileo after the Trial; Part IV Things; 11 Machines in the Garden; 12 Cosmography and the Meaning of Sundials
13 The Web of Knowing, Doing, and Patenting: William Thomson's Apparatus Room and the History of ElectricityNotes on Contributors; Index
Includes index.
This volume gathers essays that focus on the worldliness of science, its inseparable engagement in the major institutional bases of social life: law, market, church, school, and nation. With a chronological span reaching from the Renaissance to Big Science, its topics range from sundials to genetic sequences, from calculating instruments to devices that simulate human behavior, from early cartography to techniques for tracing radioactive fallout on a global scale. The book aims to show readers, with episodes drawn from the span of their modern history, the sciences in action throughout human society.
World history.
History.
Social history.
Civilization
History, Modern.
World History, Global and Transnational History.
History of Science.
Social History.
Cultural History.
Modern History.