Tag Archives: history of science
“Two hundred thousand hardships, privations, and dangers”: A Spanish Naturalist in the New World
Fourteen hundred ninety-two has gone down in history as Spain’s annus mirabilis—and the year the modern world began. The year commenced, appropriately enough, with great fanfare in a field outside the fabled city of Granada. Its main characters were King Ferdinand of Aragon and Queen Isabella of Castile, who by marriage had united Spain’s two […]
The Age of How-To
What made us modern? The list of the attributes of modernity keeps growing and changing. Once modernity meant “progress”; but that one took a huge shellacking in the last century, when some of the most “modern” nation-states behaved worse than the worst barbarian states of the Dark Ages. Then it was science—until anthropologists forced us […]
Science as a Hunt
Do myths tell profound truths about the world? The 17th century English philosopher and Lord Chancellor Sir Francis Bacon thought so. Bacon, who is widely regarded as having first developed a philosophy of experimental science, was a diligent student of ancient Greek and Roman mythology. Convinced that the ancient myths concealed deep mysteries, he wrote […]
Practical Alchemy in the Renaissance
In 1535, the German printer Christian Egenolff, who had recently set up shop in Frankfurt, published a 45-page booklet titled Kunstbüchlein (Little Book of Skills). This rough little pamphlet, cheaply printed on coarse paper just in time to be offered for sale at the Frankfurt Book Fair that year, would hardly seem a likely candidate […]
The ‘Professors of Secrets’ and Their Books
Last weekend, “This American Life” host Ira Glass revealed what he claimed was the original formula for Coca-Cola. He found it buried in an article in the archives of The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. The recipe spread across the Internet, republished everywhere from CNN to Al Jazeera. The revelation of the secret—more valued than KFC’s famous “11 […]
Gravity: Manifest or Mechanical? Revisiting the Leibniz-Clarke Correspondence
[Note: In my seminar on “The Scientific Revolution” this semester, I assigned graduate students to write a blog post that, once revised by the class during a workshop, I would publish on my “Labyrinth of Nature” blog. This is the third piece from that seminar, by Master’s history student J.D. Wolflick.] In 1687, Isaac Newton published […]
Of Puppies and Toads: Marvelous Cures for the Plague
[Note: In my seminar on “The Scientific Revolution” this semester, I assigned graduate students to write a blog post that, once revised by the class during a workshop, I would publish on my “Labyrinth of Nature” blog. It was an exceptionally useful writing assignment because it helped the students identify an interesting problem or topic and […]
The Disease Called Curiosity
Nowadays we think of curiosity as an emotion necessary for the advancement of knowledge, indeed as the well-spring of scientific discovery. It was not always so. Saint Augustine, in the fourth century, stated the traditional medieval view of curiosity, and it wasn’t favorable. In the Confessions, the Bishop of Hippo made inquisitiveness in general the […]
