Reviews for Essays on Galileo and the history and philosophy of science

The average rating for Essays on Galileo and the history and philosophy of science based on 2 reviews is 4 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2015-12-24 00:00:00 Cole Howell Pedersen's history has been issued in a revised edition incorporating research up until 1990. As the preface to the first edition of 1974 frankly indicates, the English title is a misnomer. The text pays no more than glancing attention to either pre-hellenic or Indian and Chinese developments in physics. Furthermore, while Islamic contributions are treated, they are regarded less as representing a tradition in their own right, more as tributaries to Western sciences. Given these limitations, however, the text is a creditable survey of Western physics, astronomy and the mathematical tools utilized thereby from the Presocratics through the Renaissance. The classicist will be interested in this work on at least two counts. First, half of it covers classical Greek sciences themselves in a manner accessible to any reader with a rudimentary background in mathematics and physics. Second, the latter portion, while devoted to the middle ages in Europe, does deal considerably with the controversies regarding the transmission of ideas and technologies. On the matter of transmission, Pedersen avoids the facile generalities stemming from the renaissance and assigns more importance to social institutions and original research than to the Greeks, whether read in the original or as transmitted via the Arabic. He does, however, tend to follow the dubious practice of assigning discoveries to what happen to be our earliest sources. Thus Parmenides is represented as the originator of the notion that lunar radiation is reflected--an hypothesis which quite likely has been perennial. Still, on the whole, the work is conservative, evidentially grounded with a minimum of bold speculation

Review # 2 was written on 2013-09-08 00:00:00 Jay Margolis I read Darkness at Night because it appeared in the footnotes of Edgar A. Poe: Mournful and Never-ending Remembrance. Silverman was discussing Poe's Eureka, a "poem" that Poe claimed would explain the universe, revolutionize the world of science & philosophy, etc. Among many other riddles, Poe takes on the question of why the night sky is dark. Here's the basic question. Whenever you look up at the sky, your eye is meeting a star - somewhere, no matter how distant. And if there's millions, billions, trillions of stars, it's all the more likely that anywhere you look, your gaze connects to a star. So, with all those pinpricks of light in the sky, why don't they act like pixels, and create a bright sky at night? Why aren't the skies filled with starlight? Harrison answers this question very thoroughly, by reviewing all the previous theories and explanations. It turns out that in order to answer this question, you need to talk about the nature of light, of space, whether the universe is expanding, and twenty or so other cosmological questions. He starts far back, with the Pre-Socratics, and goes all the way into the second half of the 20th century. All this is interesting, but for me, it suffers from a problem common to a lot of science writing. If you already know the current answer to these questions, then hearing ancient Greek or 17th century theories about light has a piquant thrill - kind of like correcting an inaccurate rumor. But if you don't, then it gets rather confusing, and it becomes a succession of odd analogies ("Let's say you have a lightbulb in a box") and theologies. Overall, I would recommend this book to those curious about the history of science, and the ways imagination confronts a paradox over time.