The Janus Faces of Science in the Seventeenth Century: Athanasius Kircher and Isaac Newton

2000 ◽  
pp. 221-246
Author(s):  
Paula Findlen
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Isaac Newton ◽  
Athanasius Kircher

The Curious Eye

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Erin Webster
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Human Vision ◽  
Francis Bacon ◽  
Robert Hooke ◽  
Robert Boyle ◽  
Isaac Newton ◽  
Johannes Kepler ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Historical Moment

The Curious Eye explores early modern debates over two related questions: what are the limits of human vision, and to what extent can these limits be overcome by technological enhancement? Today, in our everyday lives we rely on optical technology to provide us with information about visually remote spaces even as we question the efficacy and ethics of such pursuits. But the debates surrounding the subject of technologically mediated vision have their roots in a much older literary tradition in which the ability to see beyond the limits of natural human vision is associated with philosophical and spiritual insight as well as social and political control. The Curious Eye provides insight into the subject of optically mediated vision by returning to the literature of the seventeenth century, the historical moment in which human visual capacity in the West was first extended through the application of optical technologies to the eye. Bringing imaginative literary works by Francis Bacon, John Milton, Margaret Cavendish, and Aphra Behn together with optical and philosophical treatises by Johannes Kepler, René Descartes, Robert Hooke, Robert Boyle, and Isaac Newton, The Curious Eye explores the social and intellectual impact of the new optical technologies of the seventeenth century on its literature. At the same time, it demonstrates that social, political, and literary concerns are not peripheral to the optical science of the period but rather an integral part of it, the legacy of which we continue to experience.

Troubled Senses

2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jed Z. Buchwald ◽  
Mordechai Feingold
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Human History ◽  
Ancient History ◽  
Historical Knowledge ◽  
Isaac Newton ◽  
Argumentative Structure

This chapter considers the roots of Isaac Newton’s interest in natural and historical knowledge. In the late seventeenth century, experiment-based knowledge remained suspect. Technical chronologers developed systems of concordances and sequences that located events of human history in time by means of their simultaneous occurrences with particular astronomical events, usually eclipses. It is precisely here that Isaac Newton, as a chronologer, differed programatically from his predecessors: he sought to use astronomical tools to mold singular events into a system for understanding ancient history, indeed for grasping the entire development of civilization—what’s more, a system that shared and exemplified the same evidentiary and argumentative structure deployed in his science.

The Symbol Master

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joseph Mazur
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Rene Descartes ◽  
Integral Calculus ◽  
Isaac Newton ◽  
René Descartes

This chapter focuses on the symbols created by Gottfried Leibniz. Alert to the advantages of proper symbols, Leibniz worked them, altered them, and tossed them whenever he felt the looming possibility that some poorly devised symbol might someday unnecessarily complicate mathematical exposition. He foresaw how symbols for polynomials could not possibly continue into algebra's generalizations at the turn of the seventeenth century. He knew how inconvenient symbols trapped the advancement of algebra in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. By the last half of the seventeenth century, symbols were pervasive in mathematics manuscripts, largely due to Leibniz, along with others such as William Oughtred, René Descartes, and Isaac Newton. Among the more than 200 new symbols invented by Leibniz are his symbols for the differential and integral calculus.

Analysis, philosophical issues in

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
I. Grattan-Guinness
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Set Theory ◽  
Integral Calculus ◽  
Analytic Proof ◽  
Isaac Newton ◽  
The Status ◽  
Point Set ◽  
Convergence And Divergence ◽  
Major Branch

The term ‘mathematical analysis’ refers to the major branch of mathematics which is concerned with the theory of functions and includes the differential and integral calculus. Analysis and the calculus began as the study of curves, calculus being concerned with tangents to and areas under curves. The focus was shifted to functions following the insight, due to Leibniz and Isaac Newton in the second half of the seventeenth century, that a curve is the graph of a function. Algebraic foundations were proposed by Lagrange in the late eighteenth century; assuming that any function always took an expansion in a power series, he defined the derivatives from the coefficients of the terms. In the 1820s his assumption was refuted by Cauchy, who had already launched a fourth approach, like Newton’s based on limits, but formulated much more carefully. It was refined further by Weierstrass, by means which helped to create set theory. Analysis also encompasses the theory of limits and of the convergence and divergence of infinite series; modern versions also use point set topology. It has taken various forms over the centuries, of which the older ones are still represented in some notations and terms. Philosophical issues include the status of infinitesimals, the place of logic in the articulation of proofs, types of definition, and the (non-) relationship to analytic proof methods.

The Oxford Handbook of the History of Physics

2017 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Quantum Physics ◽  
Special Theory ◽  
Photoelectric Effect ◽  
History Of Physics ◽  
Theory Of Relativity ◽  
Instrument Making ◽  
Isaac Newton ◽  
History Of ◽  
Long Eighteenth Century

This Handbook traces the history of physics, bringing together chapters on major advances in the field from the seventeenth century to the present day. It is organized into four sections, following a broadly chronological structure. Part I explores the place of reason, mathematics, and experiment in the age of what we know as the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century. The contributions of Galileo, René Descartes, and Isaac Newton are central to this section, as is the multiplicity of paths to the common goal of understanding. Some of these paths reflected the turn to Thomas Kuhn’s category of ‘Baconian’ sciences — newer, more empirical investigations focused on heat, electricity, magnetism, optics, and chemistry. Part II looks at the ‘long’ eighteenth century — a period that covers developments relating to the physics of imponderable fluids, mechanics, electricity, and magnetism. Part III is broadly concerned with the nineteenth century and covers topics ranging from optics and thermal physics to thermodynamics, electromagnetism and field physics, electrodynamics, the evolution of the instrument-making industry between 1850 and 1930, and the applications of physics in medicine and metrology. Part IV takes us into the age of ‘modern physics’ and considers canonical landmarks such as the discovery of the photoelectric effect in 1887, Max Planck’s work on the quanta of radiation, Albert Einstein’s special theory of relativity of 1905, and the elaboration of the various facets of quantum physics between 1900 and 1930.

The Libraries of Newton, Hooke and Boyle

1966 ◽  
Vol 21 (1) ◽  
pp. 42-55 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Scientific Literature ◽  
Scientific Theories ◽  
Robert Hooke ◽  
Sir Isaac Newton ◽  
Robert Boyle ◽  
Isaac Newton ◽  
The Past ◽  
The World ◽  
History Of

The demand and search for the scientific literature of the past has grown enormously in the last twenty years. In an age as conscious as ours of the significance of science to mankind, some scientists naturally turned their thoughts to the origins of science as we know it, how scientific theories grew and how discoveries were made. Both institutions and individual scientists partake in these interests and form collections of books necessary for their study. How did their predecessors fare in this respect? They, of course, formed their libraries at a time when books were easy to find—and cheap. But what did they select for their particular reading? For example, what did the libraries of the three greatest scientists of the seventeenth century, Sir Isaac Newton, Robert Hooke and Robert Boyle, look like? Fortunately in the case of Newton, the history of his books is now fairly clear, thanks to the devoted labours of Colonel R . de Villamil (i), but it is a sad reflection on our attitude to our great intellectual leaders that this library o f the greatest English scientist, whose work changed the world for hundreds of years, was not taken care of, was, in fact, forgotten and at times entirely neglected.

Was There a Scientific Revolution?

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
John L. Heilbron
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Scientific Revolution ◽  
Early Modern Europe ◽  
Republic Of Letters ◽  
Isaac Newton ◽  
Natural Knowledge ◽  
René Descartes ◽  
Modern Europe ◽  
The Republic

This article asks whether there was a Scientific Revolution (SR) at anytime between 1550 and1800. The label ‘Scientific Revolution’ to indicate a period in the development of natural knowledge in early modern Europe has carved a place in historiography. This article suggests that there was SR, if SR signifies a period of time; perhaps, if it is taken as a metaphor. It illustrates how the deployment of the metaphor to seventeenth-century natural knowledge might be accomplished. It also considers the physics of René Descartes, the influence of Cartesianism throughout the Republic of Letters, and the academies. The metaphor can be useful if it is taken in analogy to a major political revolution. The analogy points to a later onset, and a swifter career, for the SR than is usually prescribed, and shows that Isaac Newton was its counter rather than its culmination.

Fire and Brimstone

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter Wothers
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Fifteenth Century ◽  
Night Time ◽  
The Earth ◽  
Right Hand ◽  
Deep Underground ◽  
Athanasius Kircher ◽  
Hot Baths

Sulfur has long been associated with the fiery domain of hell, and with its god. In the fifteenth-century poem The Assembly of Gods, after describing Othea, the goddess of wisdom, the anonymous author continues with an account of the god of the underworld: . . . And next to her was god Pluto set Wyth a derke myst envyroned all aboute His clothynge was made of a smoky net His colour was both wythin & wythoute Full derke & dӯme his eyen grete & stoute Of fyre & sulphure all his odour waas That wo was me while I behelde his faas . . . Even more terrifying is the account from the Vatican Mythographers, in which Pluto is described as ‘an intimidating personage sitting on a throne of sulphur, holding the sceptre of his realm in his right hand, and with his left strangling a soul’. This association between sulfur and the fiery underworld is perhaps understandable given that the element is often found in the vicinity of volcanoes. In Mundus Subterraneus, one of many books written by the seventeenth-century polymath Athanasius Kircher (1602–80), the author describes a night-time visit to Vesuvius in the year 1638—just seven years after the great eruption of 1631. He tells us that after arriving at the crater, ‘I saw what is horrible to be expressed, I saw it all over of a light fire, with an horrible combustion, and stench of Sulphur and burning Bitumen. Here forthwith being astonished at the unusual sight of the thing; Methoughts I beheld the habitation of Hell; wherein nothing else seemed to be much wanting, besides the horrid fantasms and apparitions of Devils.’ Kircher believed that the volcanoes were fed by massive fires deep underground, as he tells us in the opening of his book: . . . That there are Subterraneous Conservatories, and Treasuries of Fire (even as well, as there are of Water, and Air, &c.) and vast Abysses, and bottomless Gulphs in the Bowels and very Entrals of the Earth, stored therewith, no sober Philosopher can deny; If he do but consider the prodigious Vulcano’s, or fire-belching Mountains; the eruptions of sulphurous fires not only out of the Earth, but also out of the very Sea; the multitude and variety of hot Baths every where occurring. . . .

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