Baroque science
In Baroque Science, Ofer Gal and Raz D. Chen-Morris present a radically new perspective on the study of early modern science. Instead of the triumph of reason and rationality and the celebration of the discoveries and breakthroughs of the period, they examine science in the context of the baroque, analyzing the tensions, paradoxes, and compromises that shaped the New Science of the seventeenth century and enabled its spectacular success. Gal and Chen-Morris show how scientists during the seventeenth century turned away from the trust in the acquisition of knowledge through the senses towards a growing reliance on the mediation of artificial instruments, such as lenses and mirrors for observation and mechanical and pneumatic devices for experimentation. Likewise, the mathematical techniques and procedures that allowed the success of mathematical natural philosophy turned increasingly obscure and artificial, and in place of divine harmonies they revealed an assemblage of isolated, contingent laws and constants -- Provided by Publisher
Print Book, English, 2013
The University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 2013