Get Your Hands On The Invention Of Science: A New History Of The Scientific Revolution Authored By David Wootton In Brochure

Invention of Science, a scholarly work, is written for a purpose quite different from the understanding it provides to most readers who are not experts in the field.


The author is a master of the field, Many of his arguments are counterpoints to positions taken by other renowned experts, These may be critical but subtleties are going to be beyond the comprehension of the rest, The enormous amount of details provided could be important for those in the field, but lay readers do not have the advantage of the supporting evidence or criticisms used by those being countered.
As a result, the details get overwhelming every so often through the book,

Yet, the book is a fascinating work, To explain its unintended utility, let me use the example of an era our generation knows information revolution.
The similarities are definitely not precise for example, meaningful developments were over a span of decades and centuries during what is later defined as the scientific revolution era while for us major innovation leaps happened in months and years.
Still, such an example would help, Say, a later day historian is writing a book called The Invention of Digitization, language of the time which could freely include the words like apps, browsing/search, GPUs or cloud can fully explain the the zigzag path through whichprocessors, floppy disks, FTPs, GUIs, modems etc this world evolved.


What Galileo, Columbus and all the discoverers of those eras did was quite different not only from their viewpoints but also from ours.
Of course, they told us about gravity and showed the way to America but they discovered "discovery".
They started multiple new paths of inquiry and processes that have shaped our sciences, learning and technology ever since.
What constitutes a theory or a hypothesis, the roles played by evidences, the importance of facts, the falsifiability and accumulation of rational knowledge these are some of a large number of topics discussed in a fascinating way in this book.


This is not an easy book, So many arguments would appear overly pedantic for nonexperts, Or simply a gibberish intended for another expert in the field who is not in agreement, Yet, for the patient, the book throws flashlight on the times that sparked something immense for the humanity, and mostly in the language or methods of that time rather than those of the later days.
I had hopes this book was about the invention of science, in part because I was trained and worked as a scientist.
Alas, the book turned out to be about the philosophy of the history of the history of science.
Most of the book was about the origin of words needed to understand science, For example the author spent aboutpages on the word "fact, " He pointed out that beforethere was no such word because the western world had no such concept of a scientific fact.
With the beginning of experiments in theth century, which was the invention of science, they finally needed a word to refer to a scientific fact established by an experiment.
OK, interesting, butpages: give me a break,
The reason the invention didn't occur until theth century is that there was no need.
Aristotle had explained every thing, For example Aristotle opined the obvious that heavy bodies fall faster than light bodies, Do you think Aristotle could have takenminutes to see if that was true, which of course it wasn't.
So for almost,years the world was perfectly happy with Aristotle's reams of nonsense,
Bottom line, not recommended for anyone except philosophers of the history of science, This book is very heavy on the historical, philosophical, anthropological, even linguistic aspects of the “history” of sciences, yet without solid understanding of the sciences beneath those tumultuous changes and the mathematics that linking them together.
Its more of a general history book by a historian not a scientific book about the true history, essence, and beginning of science.
A complete joke and waste of time, Dont read it if you are truly interested in the beginning of sciences, Wootton claims there are two major philosophical camps among those who write about the history of science.
He calls them the 'realists' and the 'relativists', The realists regard science as essentially a formalized application of human common sense, To them, science is a systematic method of asking questions about the natural world, which leads to reasonably accurate answers.
As these answers build upon one another, collective human understanding grows, It's almost inevitable. Relativists, on the other hand, see science as an aspect of human culture, Both the questions it asks and the answers it finds are culturally dependent, so it never obtains any objective knowledge and consequently cannot progress in the sense that it gets us closer to a true understanding of what the world actually is or how it works.
Instead, it creates stories about the world that work for a particular culture at a particular time.
Relativism, he claims, "has been the dominant position in the history of science" for some time Pg.
. This seems odd to me since, of the two extremes, relativism seems the most absurd, but that's what he says.
Since he's the expert and I'm not, I'm sadly willing to entertain the idea that he may be right about this.


Wootton sees some merit in both of these perspectives, and this book is his attempt to reconcile them.
His selfappointed task can be summarized in these quotes that appear near the end of the book:

The task, in other words, is to understand how reliable knowledge and scientific progress can and do result from a flawed, profoundly contingent, culturally relative, alltoohuman process.
pg.
Hence the need for an historical epistemology which allows us to make sense of the ways in which we interact with the physical world and each other in the pursuit of knowledge.
The central task of such an epistemology is not to explain why we have been successful in our pursuit of scientific knowledge there is no good answer to that question.
Rather it is to track the evolutionary process by which success has been built upon success that way we can come to understand that science works, and how it works.
Pg.

And this is what he does in an extensively researched and exhaustively documented account of the development and evolution of science.
The way of thinking, which we now call science, truly was new and revolutionary, It emerged primarily in Western Europe between the times of Columbus and Newton, Wootton doesn't claim a single igniting spark, but he gives Columbus's voyage incredit for providing a powerful challenge to the prevailing belief that the ancients had known everything worth knowing.
Although Columbus himself never accepted that the land he found by traveling west from Spain was a previously unknown continent, others soon came to this realization, and it showed that the authority of Ptolemy, Aristotle, and Holy Scripture were not as absolute as people believed.
Here was an entirely new world, with strange animals, plants, and people, which the respected and authoritative ancients had known nothing about.
Possibly just as significant was that the existence of these two huge continents was not found through philosophical reflection or by divine revelation.
This new land was 'discovered' by a bunch of scruffy sailorscommoners!

From here, he explains that these emerging ideas added new words and new and modern definitions to old words, such as 'discovery', 'fact', 'experiment', 'objectivity', and 'evidence'.
These all have their current meanings because of the scientific way of viewing the world that emerged between theth andth centuries.
Personally, I think his discussion of the word 'evidence' goes into more detail and greater length than needed to make his point, but for those in academia, it may be helpful.


He also shows how culture influenced the development of

scientific thinking, More often than not, the culture of this time hindered rather than helped, Prior to the scientific revolution, philosophical disputes were decided through clever rhetoric, creative verbal arguments, and appeals to tradition and authority.
Because of this, early practitioners of science felt it necessary to justify themselves by citing the works of longdead philosophers like Epicurus, Democritus, and Lucretius.
Although none had the authority of Aristotle, they were ancient, which implied a certain respectability, The new scientific way of thinking, on the other hand, "sought to resolve intellectual disputes through experimentation.
" pg.

I am more of an interested observer of science than I am a practitioner, but I have to admit that the realist view seems far closer to the truth to me than does the relativist concept.
It is undeniable that science is done by scientists, that scientists are people, and that people are shaped by the cultures in which they live.
But modern science originally began by challenging the assumptions of the culture in which it first emerged, and it retains that aspect of cultural skepticism to this day.
I suspect that many current scientists are motivated, at least in part, by the dream of possibly overturning a prevailing theory or showing that it is somehow flawed or incomplete.
In theth century, challenging cultural assumptions could bring a long, uncomfortable visit with inquisitors followed by a short, hot time tied to a stake.
Today, it can bring a scientist fame and fortune,

Scientific progress isn't inevitable, but it can and does reveal culturally independent facts, Scientists are products of their cultures, but the process of science intentionally strives to put those cultural assumptions aside.
It may be the only human activity that does so,
Very granular at times but necessary to lay the groundwork for the language and fundamental understandings required to define and describe science at its origin.
He dudado entre tres y cuatro estrellas, pero al final ha pesado la gran erudición demostrada.
Hay partes pesadísimas en la obra, de escaso interés, como cuando analiza el origen de ciertas palabras.
pero en general el tema es tan interesante de por sí que hace que soportes esas partes torturantes y sigas adelante.
Lo mejor las reflexiones historiográficas, This book has a remarkable quantity of science history, specially the investigation of the use of new words like discovery, invention, experiment, evidence, hypothesis, thesis, etc.
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Wootton have a chronological order, and let us explore different texts of multiple authors, including some obscure theologians, explorers, and diverse philosophers that started to use the new words to describe what is happening on science.


It's clear that it is difficult to talk about a scientific revolution, even more difficult to associate the industrial revolution with the scientific one he gave some examples, but science is faster than technology, like the examples of Galileo and the Jupiter moons to measure time.


Also, the book have a fatal flaw, most of the documents are from English philosophers or scientist, with the notable exceptions of Galileo, Descartes and Pascal, we don't have a glance of the French point of view of science history besides remarks on Diderot and Voltaire, there is not a profound exploration.


Anyway, the quotes and notes are extremely useful, and it is a good book to start before to go to the new classics like Kuhn or Popper.
We live in a world made by science, How and when did this happen This book tells the story of the extraordinary intellectual and cultural revolution that gave birth to modern science, and mounts a major challenge to the prevailing orthodoxy of its history.


Beforeit was assumed that all significant knowledge was already available there was no concept of progress people looked for understanding to the past not the future.
This book argues that the discovery of America demonstrated that new knowledge was possible: indeed it introduced the very concept of 'discovery', and opened the way to the invention of science.


The first crucial discovery was Tycho Brahe's nova of: proof that there could be change in the heavens.
The telescoperendered the old astronomy obsolete, Torricelli's experiment with the vacuumled directly to the triumph of the experimental method in the Royal Society of Boyle and Newton.
ByNewtonianism was being celebrated throughout Europe,

The new science did not consist simply of new discoveries, or new methods, It relied on a new understanding of what knowledge might be, and with this came a new language: discovery, progress, facts, experiments, hypotheses, theories, laws of nature almost all these terms existed before, but their meanings were radically transformed so they became tools with which to think scientifically.
We all now speak this language of science, which was invented during the Scientific Revolution,

The new culture had its martyrs Bruno, Galileo, its heroes Kepler, Boyle, its propagandists Voltaire, Diderot, and its patient labourers Gilbert, Hooke.
It led to a new rationalism, killing off alchemy, astrology, and belief in witchcraft, It led to the invention of the steam engine and to the first Industrial Revolution, David Wootton's landmark book changes our understanding of how this great transformation came about, and of what science is.
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