| Physical description |
224 pages ; 24 cm |
| Bibliography |
Includes bibliographical references and index. |
| Contents |
Chapter 1 Making Worlds 13 -- Chapter 2 Tycho's Illusion 41 -- Chapter 3 Discovery of Discovery 77 -- Chapter 4 Around-the-Corner Inquiry 111 -- Chapter 5 Stevin, Gilbert, Kepler, and Galileo 137 -- Chapter 6 Emergence of Probability 171 -- Epilogue: Cognition and Politics 193 -- Appendix AC and the Industrial Revolution 203. |
| Summary |
In 1543, Copernicus proposed that the Earth was not the center of the universe, but a planet among planets, engaged in a timeless dance around the Sun. Two generations later, this wild idea inspired a brilliant burst of discovery which marked the opening of the Scientific Revolution. Or did it? In recent years, this old standby in the history of Western science has come under fire from historians who see Copernicus as a fundamentally conservative figure who had essentially nothing to do with the Scientific Revolution. In It Started with Copernicus, Howard Margolis provides a powerful argument that Copernicus, as the old view posited, was indeed the key figure of the Scientific Revolution, but in a way very different from what the old view supposed. |
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Around 1600, Margolis shows something happened to radically, and permanently, change the pace of scientific discovery. But what occasioned this change? All of the evidence for a revolution is there. The discoveries in science near 1600 easily outweighed everything produced in the previous fourteen centuries. The key, Margolis argues, is to notice that all the discoveries came from a handful of men, each of whom turns out to have been an ardent Copernican. Further, while some of the discoveries turned on new information and devices, most required nothing beyond what had been available to Aristotle. Somehow what had always been at hand now became actually usable. |
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Howard Margolis's Patterns, Thinking and Cognition (1987) prompted an enthusiastic response from Thomas Kuhn. He wrote to Margolis to say that he found it "absolutely first class, a major contribution to issues I care deeply about." Kuhn was particularly interested in the book's cognitive account of how Copernicus seems to have been pushed towards his discovery by the shock to intuition of the new world maps that appeared in 1507. For the first time, maps showed what soon came to called the New World on the back side of the Earth. Columbus had died only a year earlier still believing he had reached Asia. Now this paradigm shifting cognitive shock becomes the crucial turn in an account of a still grander episode, the Scientific Revolution. |
| Subject |
Science, Medieval.
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Science, Renaissance.
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| ISBN |
007138507X |
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