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The Aspiring Adept Robert Boyle And His Alchemical Quest
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Book Synopsis The Aspiring Adept by : Lawrence Principe
Download or read book The Aspiring Adept written by Lawrence Principe and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2018-06-05 with total page 354 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Aspiring Adept presents a provocative new view of Robert Boyle (1627-1691), one of the leading figures of the Scientific Revolution, by revealing for the first time his avid and lifelong pursuit of alchemy. Boyle has traditionally been considered, along with Newton, a founder of modern science because of his mechanical philosophy and his experimentation with the air-pump and other early scientific apparatus. However, Lawrence Principe shows that his alchemical quest--hidden first by Boyle's own codes and secrecy, and later suppressed or ignored--positions him more accurately in the intellectual and cultural crossroads of the seventeenth century. Principe radically reinterprets Boyle's most famous work, The Sceptical Chymist, to show that it criticizes not alchemists, as has been thought, but "unphilosophical" pharmacists and textbook writers. He then shows Boyle's unambiguous enthusiasm for alchemy in his "lost" Dialogue on the Transmutation and Melioration of Metals, now reconstructed from scattered fragments and presented here in full for the first time. Intriguingly, Boyle believed that the goal of his quest, the Philosopher's Stone, could not only transmute base metals into gold, but could also attract angels. Alchemy could thus act both as a source of knowledge and as a defense against the growing tide of atheism that tormented him. In seeking to integrate the seemingly contradictory facets of Boyle's work, Principe also illuminates how alchemy and other "unscientific" pursuits had a far greater impact on early modern science than has previously been thought.
Book Synopsis The Aspiring Adept by : Lawrence M. Principe
Download or read book The Aspiring Adept written by Lawrence M. Principe and published by . This book was released on 1998 with total page 339 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Book Synopsis Alchemy Tried in the Fire by : William R. Newman
Download or read book Alchemy Tried in the Fire written by William R. Newman and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2005-06 with total page 362 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: William Newman and Lawrence Principe reveal the hitherto hidden laboratory experiments of a famous alchemist and argue that many of the principles and practices characteristic of modern chemistry derive from alchemy.
Book Synopsis Leviathan and the Air-Pump by : Steven Shapin
Download or read book Leviathan and the Air-Pump written by Steven Shapin and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2011-08-15 with total page 446 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Leviathan and the Air-Pump examines the conflicts over the value and propriety of experimental methods between two major seventeenth-century thinkers: Thomas Hobbes, author of the political treatise Leviathan and vehement critic of systematic experimentation in natural philosophy, and Robert Boyle, mechanical philosopher and owner of the newly invented air-pump. The issues at stake in their disputes ranged from the physical integrity of the air-pump to the intellectual integrity of the knowledge it might yield. Both Boyle and Hobbes were looking for ways of establishing knowledge that did not decay into ad hominem attacks and political division. Boyle proposed the experiment as cure. He argued that facts should be manufactured by machines like the air-pump so that gentlemen could witness the experiments and produce knowledge that everyone agreed on. Hobbes, by contrast, looked for natural law and viewed experiments as the artificial, unreliable products of an exclusive guild. The new approaches taken in Leviathan and the Air-Pump have been enormously influential on historical studies of science. Shapin and Schaffer found a moment of scientific revolution and showed how key scientific givens--facts, interpretations, experiment, truth--were fundamental to a new political order. Shapin and Schaffer were also innovative in their ethnographic approach. Attempting to understand the work habits, rituals, and social structures of a remote, unfamiliar group, they argued that politics were tied up in what scientists did, rather than what they said. Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer use the confrontation between Hobbes and Boyle as a way of understanding what was at stake in the early history of scientific experimentation. They describe the protagonists' divergent views of natural knowledge, and situate the Hobbes-Boyle disputes within contemporary debates over the role of intellectuals in public life and the problems of social order and assent in Restoration England. In a new introduction, the authors describe how science and its social context were understood when this book was first published, and how the study of the history of science has changed since then.
Book Synopsis Chymists and Chymistry by : Lawrence Principe
Download or read book Chymists and Chymistry written by Lawrence Principe and published by . This book was released on 2007 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume brings together papers presented at an international conference at the Chemical Heritage Foundation in 2006 by over twenty eminent researchers. The collection features work on the perennial issues of symbolism, textual exegesis, transmutation and the danger of fraud, as well as treatments of the intersections of alchemy with fine art, theology, archaeology, and gender. Chymists and Chymistry offers readers a wealth of new scholarship on this intriguing topic and glimpses of the exciting frontiers in chymistry waiting to be explored.--Publisher.
Book Synopsis No Shadow of a Doubt by : Daniel Kennefick
Download or read book No Shadow of a Doubt written by Daniel Kennefick and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2021-03-09 with total page 416 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: On their 100th anniversary, the story of the extraordinary scientific expeditions that ushered in the era of relativity In 1919, British scientists led extraordinary expeditions to Brazil and Africa to test Albert Einstein's revolutionary new theory of general relativity in what became the century's most celebrated scientific experiment. The result ushered in a new era and made Einstein a global celebrity by confirming his dramatic prediction that the path of light rays would be bent by gravity. Today, Einstein's theory is scientific fact. Yet the effort to weigh light by measuring the gravitational deflection of starlight during the May 29, 1919, solar eclipse has become clouded by myth and skepticism. Could Arthur Eddington and Frank Dyson have gotten the results they claimed? Did the pacifist Eddington falsify evidence to foster peace after a horrific war by validating the theory of a German antiwar campaigner? In No Shadow of a Doubt, Daniel Kennefick provides definitive answers by offering the most comprehensive and authoritative account of how expedition scientists overcame war, bad weather, and equipment problems to make the experiment a triumphant success. The reader follows Eddington on his voyage to Africa through his letters home, and delves with Dyson into how the complex experiment was accomplished, through his notes. Other characters include Howard Grubb, the brilliant Irishman who made the instruments; William Campbell, the American astronomer who confirmed the result; and Erwin Findlay-Freundlich, the German whose attempts to perform the test in Crimea were foiled by clouds and his arrest. By chronicling the expeditions and their enormous impact in greater detail than ever before, No Shadow of a Doubt reveals a story that is even richer and more exciting than previously known.
Book Synopsis Gender and Boyle's Law of Gases by : Elizabeth Potter
Download or read book Gender and Boyle's Law of Gases written by Elizabeth Potter and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2001-04-22 with total page 228 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Boyle's Law, which describes the relation between the pressure and volume of a gas, was worked out by Robert Boyle in the mid-1600s. His experiments are still considered examples of good scientific work and continue to be studied along with their historical and intellectual contexts by philosophers, historians, and sociologists. Now there is controversy over whether Boyle's work was based only on experimental evidence or whether it was influenced by the politics and religious controversies of the time, including especially class and gender politics. Elizabeth Potter argues that even good science is sometimes influenced by such issues, and she shows that the work leading to the Gas Law, while certainly based on physical evidence, was also shaped by class and gendered considerations. At issue were two descriptions of nature, each supporting radically different visions of class and gender arrangements. Boyle's Law rested on mechanistic principles, but Potter shows us an alternative law based on hylozooic principles (the belief that all matter is animated), whose adherents challenged social stability and the status quo in 17th-century England.
Book Synopsis The Scientific Revolution: A Very Short Introduction by : Lawrence Principe
Download or read book The Scientific Revolution: A Very Short Introduction written by Lawrence Principe and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2011-04-28 with total page 169 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Lawrence M. Principe takes a fresh approach to the story of the scientific revolution, emphasising the historical context of the society and its world view at the time. From astronomy to alchemy and medicine to geology, he tells this fascinating story from the perspective of the historical characters involved.
Book Synopsis Promethean Ambitions by : William R. Newman
Download or read book Promethean Ambitions written by William R. Newman and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2004 with total page 351 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In an age when the nature of reality is complicated daily by advances in bioengineering, cloning, and artificial intelligence, it is easy to forget that the ever-evolving boundary between nature and technology has long been a source of ethical and scientific concern: modern anxieties about the possibility of artificial life and the dangers of tinkering with nature more generally were shared by opponents of alchemy long before genetic science delivered us a cloned sheep named Dolly. In Promethean Ambitions, William R. Newman ambitiously uses alchemy to investigate the thinning boundary between the natural and the artificial. Focusing primarily on the period between 1200 and 1700, Newman examines the labors of pioneering alchemists and the impassioned—and often negative—responses to their efforts. By the thirteenth century, Newman argues, alchemy had become a benchmark for determining the abilities of both men and demons, representing the epitome of creative power in the natural world. Newman frames the art-nature debate by contrasting the supposed transmutational power of alchemy with the merely representational abilities of the pictorial and plastic arts—a dispute which found artists such as Leonardo da Vinci and Bernard Palissy attacking alchemy as an irreligious fraud. The later assertion by the Paracelsian school that one could make an artificial human being—the homunculus—led to further disparagement of alchemy, but as Newman shows, the immense power over nature promised by the field contributed directly to the technological apologetics of Francis Bacon and his followers. By the mid-seventeenth century, the famous "father of modern chemistry," Robert Boyle, was employing the arguments of medieval alchemists to support the identity of naturally occurring substances with those manufactured by "chymical" means. In using history to highlight the art-nature debate, Newman here shows that alchemy was not an unformed and capricious precursor to chemistry; it was an art founded on coherent philosophical and empirical principles, with vocal supporters and even louder critics, that attracted individuals of first-rate intellect. The historical relationship that Newman charts between human creation and nature has innumerable implications today, and he ably links contemporary issues to alchemical debates on the natural versus the artificial.
Book Synopsis The Chemical Philosophy of Robert Boyle by : Marina Paola Banchetti-Robino
Download or read book The Chemical Philosophy of Robert Boyle written by Marina Paola Banchetti-Robino and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2020-07-01 with total page 200 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Robert Boyle (1627-1691) believed that a reductionist conception of the mechanical philosophy threatened the heuristic power and autonomy of chemistry as an experimental science. While some historical and philosophical scholars have examined his nuanced position, understanding the chemical philosophy he developed through his own experimental work is incredibly difficult even for experts in the field. In The Chemical Philosophy of Robert Boyle, Marina Paola Banchetti-Robino energetically explains Boyle's ideas in a whole new light and proposes that Boyle regarded chemical qualities as non-reducible dispositional and relational properties that emerge from, and supervene upon, the mechanistic structure of chymical atoms. Banchetti-Robino demonstrates that these ideas are implicit in Boyle's writing, making his philosophical contributions crucial to the fields of both philosophy and chemistry. The arguments presented are further strengthened by a detailed mereological analysis of Boylean chymical atoms as chemically elementary entities, which establishes the theory of wholes and parts that is most consistent with an emergentist conception of chemical properties. More generally, this book examines the way in which Boyle sought to accommodate his complex chemical philosophy within the framework of the 17th century mechanistic theory of matter. Banchetti-Robino conceptualizes Boyle's experimental work as a scientific research programme, in the Lakatosian sense, to better explain the positive and negative heuristic function of the mechanistic theory of matter within his chemical philosophy. The Chemical Philosophy of Robert Boyle actively engages with the contemporary and lively debates over the nature of Boyle's ideas about structural chemistry, fundamental mechanistic particles and properties, the explanatory power of subordinate causes, the complex relation between fundamental particles, natural kinds, and unified chemical wholes. The book is a rich historical account that begins with the dominant paradigms of 16th and 17th Century chemical philosophy and takes readers all the way through to the 21st Century.
Book Synopsis Einstein in Bohemia by : Michael D. Gordin
Download or read book Einstein in Bohemia written by Michael D. Gordin and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2020-02-11 with total page 356 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Though Einstein is undoubtedly one of the most important figures in the history of modern science, he was in many respects marginal. Despite being one of the creators of quantum theory, he remained skeptical of it, and his major research program while in Princeton -the quest for a unified field- ultimately failed. In this book, Michael Gordin explores this paradox in Einstein's life by concentrating on a brief and often overlooked interlude: his tenure as professor of physics in Prague, from April of 1911 to the summer of 1912. Though often dismissed by biographers and scholars, it was a crucial year for Einstein both personally and scientifically: his marriage deteriorated, he began thinking seriously about his Jewish identity for the first time, he attempted a new explanation for gravitation-which though it failed had a significant impact on his later work-and he met numerous individuals, including Max Brod, Hugo Bergmann, Philipp Frank, and Arnoést Kolman, who would continue to influence him. In a kind of double-biography of the figure and the city, this book links Prague and Einstein together. Like the man, the city exhibits the same paradox of being both central and marginal to the main contours of European history. It was to become the capital of the Czech Republic but it was always, compared to Vienna and Budapest, less central in the Habsburg Empire. Moreover, it was home to a lively Germanophone intellectual and artistic scene, thought the vast majority of its population spoke only Czech. By emphasizing the marginality and the centrality of both Einstein and Prague, Gordin sheds new light both on Einstein's life and career and on the intellectual and scientific life of the city in the early twentieth century"--
Book Synopsis Millenarianism and Messianism in Early Modern European Culture by : M. Goldish
Download or read book Millenarianism and Messianism in Early Modern European Culture written by M. Goldish and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2013-03-09 with total page 263 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The earliest scientific studies of Jewish messianism were conducted by the scholars of the Wissenschaft des Judentums school, particularly Heinrich Graetz, the first great Jewish historian of the Jews since Josephus. These researches were invaluable because they utilized primary sources in print and manuscript which had been previously unknown or used only in polemics. The Wissenschaft studies themselves, however, prove to be polemics as well on closer inspection. Among the goals of this group was to demonstrate that Judaism is a rational and logical faith whose legitimacy and historical progress deserve recognition by the nations of Europe. Mystical and messianic beliefs which might undermine this image were presented as aberrations or the result of corrosive foreign influences on the Jews. Gershom Scholem took upon himself the task of returning mysticism and messianism to their rightful central place in the panorama of Jewish thought. Jewish messianism was, for Scholem, a central theme in the philosophy and life of the Jews throughout their history, shaped anew by each generation to fit its specific hopes and needs. Scholem emphasized that this phenomenon was essentially independent of messianic or millenarian trends among other peoples. For example, in discussing messianism in the early modern era Scholem describes a trunk of influence on the Jewish psyche set off by the expulsion from Spain in 1492.
Book Synopsis Fictional Matter by : Helen Thompson
Download or read book Fictional Matter written by Helen Thompson and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2017-01-13 with total page 368 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Fictional Matter argues that chemical definitions of particulate matter shaped eighteenth-century British science and literature. In this lucid, revisionary analysis of corpuscular science, Helen Thompson advances a new account of how the experimental production of empirical knowledge defined the emergent realist novel.
Book Synopsis Atoms and Alchemy by : William R. Newman
Download or read book Atoms and Alchemy written by William R. Newman and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2010-05-05 with total page 265 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Since the Enlightenment, alchemy has been viewed as a sort of antiscience, disparaged by many historians as a form of lunacy that impeded the development of rational chemistry. But in Atoms and Alchemy, William R. Newman—a historian widely credited for reviving recent interest in alchemy—exposes the speciousness of these views and challenges widely held beliefs about the origins of the Scientific Revolution. Tracing the alchemical roots of Robert Boyle’s famous mechanical philosophy, Newman shows that alchemy contributed to the mechanization of nature, a movement that lay at the very heart of scientific discovery. Boyle and his predecessors—figures like the mysterious medieval Geber or the Lutheran professor Daniel Sennert—provided convincing experimental proof that matter is made up of enduring particles at the microlevel. At the same time, Newman argues that alchemists created the operational criterion of an “atomic” element as the last point of analysis, thereby contributing a key feature to the development of later chemistry. Atomsand Alchemy thus provokes a refreshing debate about the origins of modern science and will be welcomed—and deliberated—by all who are interested in the development of scientific theory and practice.
Book Synopsis Science, Alchemy and the Great Plague of London by : William Scott Shelley
Download or read book Science, Alchemy and the Great Plague of London written by William Scott Shelley and published by Algora Publishing. This book was released on 2017-11-10 with total page 274 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Book Synopsis Newton’s Apple and Other Myths about Science by : Ronald L. Numbers
Download or read book Newton’s Apple and Other Myths about Science written by Ronald L. Numbers and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2015-11-04 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Guardian “Favourite Reads—as Chosen by Scientists” Selection “Tackles some of science’s most enduring misconceptions.” —Discover A falling apple inspired Isaac Newton’s insight into the law of gravity—or did it really? Among the many myths debunked in this refreshingly irreverent book are the idea that alchemy was a superstitious pursuit, that Darwin put off publishing his theory of evolution for fear of public reprisal, and that Gregor Mendel was ahead of his time as a pioneer of genetics. More recent myths about particle physics and Einstein’s theory of relativity are discredited too, and a number of dubious generalizations, like the notion that science and religion are antithetical, or that science can neatly be distinguished from pseudoscience, go under the microscope of history. Newton’s Apple and Other Myths about Science brushes away popular fictions and refutes the widespread belief that science advances when individual geniuses experience “Eureka!” moments and suddenly grasp what those around them could never imagine. “Delightful...thought-provoking...Every reader should find something to surprise them.” —Jim Endersby, Science “Better than just countering the myths, the book explains when they arose and why they stuck.” —The Guardian
Book Synopsis The Cambridge Companion to Newton by : I. Bernard Cohen
Download or read book The Cambridge Companion to Newton written by I. Bernard Cohen and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2002-04-25 with total page 785 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Sir Isaac Newton (1642–1727) was one of the greatest scientists of all time, a thinker of extraordinary range and creativity who has left enduring legacies in mathematics and the natural sciences. In this volume a team of distinguished contributors examine all the main aspects of Newton's thought, including not only his approach to space, time, mechanics, and universal gravity in his Principia, his research in optics, and his contributions to mathematics, but also his more clandestine investigations into alchemy, theology, and prophecy, which have sometimes been overshadowed by his mathematical and scientific interests.
