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    The Invention of Science: A New History of the Scientific Revolution

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    by David Wootton

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    Paperback

    (Reprint)

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    • ISBN-13: 9780061759536
    • Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
    • Publication date: 12/13/2016
    • Edition description: Reprint
    • Pages: 784
    • Sales rank: 209,474
    • Product dimensions: 5.30(w) x 7.90(h) x 1.40(d)

    David Wootton is the Anniversary Professor at the University of York. His previous books include Paolo Sarpi, Bad Medicine, and Galileo. He gave the Raleigh Lectures at the British Academy in 2008, the Carlyle Lectures at the University of Oxford in 2014, and the Benedict Lecture at Boston University in 2014.

    Table of Contents

    List of Illustrations xi

    Introduction

    1 Modern Minds 3

    2 The Idea of the Scientific Revolution 15

    Part 1 The Heavens and the Earth

    3 Inventing Discovery 57

    4 Planer Earth 110

    Part 2 Seeing is Believing

    5 The Mathematization of the World 163

    6 Gulliver's Worlds 211

    Part 3 Making Knowledge

    7 Facts 251

    8 Experiments 310

    9 Laws 361

    10 Hypotheses/Theories 380

    11 Evidence and Judgement 400

    Part 4 Birth of the Modern

    12 Machines 431

    13 The Disenchantment of the World 449

    14 Knowledge is Power 476

    Conclusion: The Invention of Science

    15 In Defiance of Nature 511

    16 These Postmodern Days 544

    17 'What Do I Know?' 556

    Some Longer Notes 573

    A Note on Greek and Medieval 'Science' 573

    A Note on Religion 575

    Wittgenstein: No Relativist 577

    Notes on Relativism and Relativists 580

    A Note on Dates and Quotations 591

    A Note on the Internet 592

    Acknowledgements 595

    Endnotes 599

    Bibliography 655

    Index 723

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    A companion to such acclaimed works as The Age of Wonder, A Clockwork Universe, 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 ourselves and 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 five hundred 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, Wotton shows how these discoveries codified into a social construct and a system of knowledge. Ultimately, he makes clear the link between scientific discovery and the rise of industrialization—and the birth of the modern world we know.

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    Awards
    2016 Cundill History Prize Finalists
    Awards
    2016 Cundill History Prize Finalists
    Patricia Fara
    Fascinating and original … Wootton is a marvellous writer with an enviously encyclopaedic knowledge, and he has exciting things to say … a stimulating, well-informed and imaginative account.
    Richard Joyner
    David Wootton’s The Invention of Science is outstanding. It details how, when and why the philosophical, intellectual and practical frameworks of modern science arose, and it sees off relativism in the process. While dealing wonderfully in broad sweeps, it offers a wealth of entertaining details.
    starred review Booklist
    A bracing rediscovery of the marvel that is science
    Adhemar Bultheel
    Extremely well researched and documented…This is bound to become a basic reference in the future.
    Lorraine Daston
    A big bang moment
    Steven Poole
    Not only a history of science but a revisionist historiography of science
    Steve Donoghue
    Vibrant and impressive…The Invention of Science is a marvel of expositional clarity
    Nature
    …perceptive, thought-provoking, deeply erudite and beautifully written.
    The Economist
    Full of insights…even jaded scholars will find it fresh and compelling.
    Adam Gopnik
    New, encyclopedic history.
    Financial Times' Best Books of 2015
    A masterly account of the ‘scientific revolution.’
    Robert P. Crease
    Wootton tells his tales well and portrays characters vividly. He writes with wit, and his book is full of surprises.
    Matthew Price
    Wootton is a dazzling explicator of difficult ideas whose relish for his material is evident.
    Publishers Weekly
    10/19/2015
    This substantive narrative of human progress is engaging and well constructed for the general science or history reader. Wooton (Galileo: Watcher of the Skies), professor of history at the University of York, makes a powerful, though currently unpopular, case against a Wittgensteinian historical relativism that sees science as entirely a social construct, changing gradually and continuously since antiquity. Wooton argues instead for viewing the period between 1572 and 1704 as a scientific revolution in a true sense, during which multiple strands of thought, technology, and culture came together in unexpected ways to transform human understanding of the physical world—the “triumph of Newtonianism,” which still informs modern research and dialogue. Analysis of primary texts from key philosophers as well as chronological details of their development and use of instrumentation sit beside broader-reaching approaches that explore linguistic change over time, how perspective-drawing techniques influenced astronomy, the ways the printing press helped form critical communities, and social analyses of the “mathematization of nature” and the decline of the appeal to authority, among other topics. Wooton’s arguments stand effectively on their own, making the final chapters directed at his historian colleagues feel like bloated academic infighting. Illus. (Dec.)
    Library Journal
    11/15/2015
    This highly linguistic take on the scientific revolution is not for the easily daunted. Wootton (history of science, Univ. of York; Galileo) paints an intriguing picture of how language and science evolved together from 1572 to 1704. He points out that the concept of "discovery" was largely unknown before Christopher Columbus's journey to America, and that specialized terms such as scientist, fact, or experiment didn't take hold until the 16th century. The book begins chronologically, but readers without a firm grounding in early modern science may get lost. Another flaw is the almost complete lack of women in the narrative. Although the major players in the scientific revolution were male, Wootton mentions quite a number of obscure male contributors, so it would have been nice to include at least a few women. Most critically, this work doesn't address modern debates about science in day-to-day life (the reliability of scientific proof of global warming, evolution, etc.) and is focused instead on debunking the relativist perspective of the history of science. VERDICT Although academics, who will catch the foreshadowing, will have no trouble following Wootton's argument, casual readers are likely to quit before they reach the payoff.—Cate Hirschbiel, Iwasaki Lib., Emerson Coll., Boston
    Kirkus Reviews
    ★ 2015-10-04
    Not exactly a history of science but of our idea of science: a shrewd, thoughtful analysis of how our view of finding truth held steady throughout history and then, over a century, changed and produced the dazzling progress we often take for granted.Until the 16th century, most people believed that everything worth knowing was already known and that all questions could be answered with deep thought. Aristotle, the ultimate authority in the West, taught that one found truth through logical deductions from incontestable premises. Thus, since the heavens are unchanging and the only permanently unchanging movement is circular, all heavenly movements are circular. According to that worldview, observations are irrelevant. Columbus shattered this concept in 1492; no deduction could have predicted a new continent. Within decades, men—e.g., Copernicus in astronomy and Vesalius in anatomy—were examining phenomena with a new curiosity, claiming their findings were true even if they contradicted the official views of those in power. Many boasted of their achievements. Wootton (History/Univ. of York; Galileo: Watcher of the Skies, 2010, etc.) describes this as "a quite new type of intellectual culture: innovative, combative, competitive, but at the same time obsessed with accuracy." The author maintains that modern science took form between 1572, when Tycho Brahe saw a nova, or new star, and 1704, when Isaac Newton published Opticks, which demonstrated that white light consists of all colors of the rainbow and that color inheres in light rather than in objects. Except for denouncing modern philosophers who teach that truth is culturally determined, so all explanations of reality are equally valid, Wootton's account, as massive and sweeping as it is, stops with Newton. A superbly lucid examination of a dramatic revolution in human thought that deserves a place on the shelf with Thomas Kuhn and David Deutsch.

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