Please open https://hotaudiobook.com ONLY on your standard browser Safari, Chrome, Microsoft or Firefox to download full audiobooks of your choice for free.
Title: The Invention of Science
Subtitle: A New History of the Scientific Revolution
Author: David Wootton
Narrator: James Langton
Format: Unabridged
Length: 22 hrs and 5 mins
Language: English
Release date: 04-19-16
Publisher: Blackstone Audio, Inc.
Genres: History, World
Publisher's Summary:
A companion to such acclaimed works as The Age of Wonder and Darwin's Ghosts, a groundbreaking examination of the greatest event in history, the Scientific Revolution, and how it came to change the way we understand our world.
We live in a world transformed by scientific discovery. Yet today science and its practitioners have come under political attack. In this fascinating history spanning continents and centuries, historian David Wootton offers a lively defense of science, revealing why the Scientific Revolution was truly the greatest event in our history.
The Invention of Science goes back 500 years in time to chronicle this crucial transformation, exploring the factors that led to its birth and the people who made it happen. Wootton argues that the Scientific Revolution was actually five separate yet concurrent events that developed independently but came to intersect and create a new worldview. Here are the brilliant iconoclasts - Galileo, Copernicus, Brahe, Newton, and many more curious minds from across Europe - whose studies of the natural world challenged centuries of religious orthodoxy and ingrained superstition.
From gunpowder technology, the discovery of the new world, movable type printing, perspective painting, and the telescope to the practice of conducting experiments, the laws of nature, and the concept of the fact, Wootton shows how these discoveries codified into a social construct and a system of ideas about truth, knowledge, and progress. Ultimately he makes clear the link between scientific discovery and the rise of industrialization - and the birth of the modern world we know.
Members Reviews:
A Very Important Book
This is a fascinating book but at points a hard read. It is magisterial in its ambitions (the bibliography is 57 pp. in length) but subtle in its argument. This is not a history of the scientific revolution in the sense of a paratactic account of how that revolution unfolded (and then they discovered X and then they discovered Y and then Bacon published X and Galileo published Y . . . ) The thesis (broadly) is that scientists work with two different kinds of materialsâphysical materials (Newtonâs prisms; Newtonâs reflecting telescope) and conceptual materials (the notion of a âfactâ; the notion of a âhypothesisâ). History often deals with the first; Wootton is principally interested in the second, though he explores the first as well.
The thesis of the book is that there could be no scientific revolution without a conception (or a new conception) of key scientific ideas (scientific âlawâ, an âexperimentâ, and so on). He traces the latter at length and the research is impressive in its scope and erudition. Much of the argument is âlinguisticâ, broadly considered. He tracks the first appearance of words, the nuances in meaning as the same word is translated/interpreted across multiple European languages; the frequency of appearance of certain words in a particular text or related series of texts, and so on.
As he reaches his conclusion we can hear the voices in his head. Much of the argument has been developed with history-of-science ideology hovering in the background. Postmodern historians have argued for the constructedness of science and scientific ideas, denying the realism that characterized much former work and opting instead for relativism.
