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Questions of this sort attempt to separate science out from the rest of life--and Lisa Jardine has no time for them. Her latest book is instead a meticulous and sympathetic re-imagination of the lives of early scientists in the late 17th century. It conjures up a curious and engaging image of buccaneering science, serving its own more abstract instincts by supplying vital research to industry and the military.
Jardine shows that science is a normal commercial activity, wedded inextricably to the pursuit of profit and military advantage. Our modern idea of it as an objective, pure and even spiritual exercise--and our disappointment and anger when scientists turn out to have paymasters we do not like--is the product of a very modern habit of putting science on a pedestal.
While these topical issues inform Ingenious Pursuits, the book stays very much in its period. It is richly illustrated throughout, offering the reader a rare chance to acquire the feel and fascination of doing early science. But it is the individual stories that entice most--the founder of the British Museum collection whose fortune was founded on "medicinal" milk chocolate; Hooke and Wren's scheme to fashion out of a London rebuilt after the Great Fire a great laboratory, stocked with monumental telescopes.
The heroes and heroines of Jardine's story are engaged, business-like entrepreneurs, not white- coated supermen, and, Jardine assures us, the same is true today. How strange that we forgot it. --Simon Ings
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Book Description Soft cover. Condition: New. 8vo (23.5 cm), XX, 444 pp, plates. Laminated wrappers. "The Renaissance intellectual revolution remains one of the great unexplained events of history. What kind of upheaval was it that produced its permanent changes in our outlook and understanding? What triggered the acceleration in the growth of knowledge, such that in one century man acquired a pre-eminent ability to control nature? This work documents the forces for change which brought the human and natural sciences together and gave them shape. Each of her series of key components - among them, precise time measurement, enhanced astronomical observation, selective animal and plant breeding, and technological advances in navigation - lays a crucial part of the foundations for modern thought." (from the publisher's description). Seller Inventory # 007285
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