Galileo's Glassworks - The Telescope and the Mirror by Eileen Reeves {BinanGotit}seeders: 7
leechers: 14
Galileo's Glassworks - The Telescope and the Mirror by Eileen Reeves {BinanGotit} (Size: 1.86 MB)
DescriptionGalileo's Glassworks: The Telescope and the Mirror by Eileen Reeves (Author)  {BinanGotit} Product details Hardcover: 208 pages Publisher: Harvard University Press (11th January 2008) Language: English ISBN-10: 0674026675 ISBN-13: 978-0674026674 Hardcover: £17.95 Kindle Edition: £17.05 Reviews In Galileo's time, Eileen Reeves reports, many scientists and amateurs were experimenting with optics and purloining each other's results in a complex game of cross-national thievery. Reeves's study is a skillful interpretative blend of legend, history and science about lenses, mirrors and their conjoining in the telescope. Reeves's splendid account is a cultural and social history that sets Galileo's telescope in the rich landscape of optical science from the Middle Ages to the modern period. - Simon Mitton. "Times Higher Education Supplement" (05/22/2008) The Dutch telescope and the Italian scientist Galileo have long enjoyed a durable connection in the popular mind - so much so that it seems this simple glass instrument transformed a rather modest middle-aged scholar into the bold icon of the Copernican Revolution. And yet the extraordinary speed with which the telescope changed the course of Galileo's life and early modern astronomy obscures the astronomer's own curiously delayed encounter with the instrument. Eileen Reeves' book provides us with a significant effort for a better understanding of the cultural features involved in the making of the telescope. Highly original and innovative, "Galileo's Glassworks" paves the way for further inquiries that will deepen our knowledge of the relationship between well established cultural models and technological innovations. - Michele Camerota, Professor of the History of Science at the University of Cagliari About the Author Eileen Reeves is Associate Professor of Comparative Literature at Princeton University. This book considers the lapse between the telescope's creation in The Hague in 1608 and Galileo's alleged acquaintance with such news ten months later. In an inquiry into scientific and cultural history, Eileen Reeves explores two fundamental questions of intellectual accountability: what did Galileo know of the invention of the telescope, and when did he know it?The record suggests that Galileo, like several of his peers, initially misunderstood the basic design of the telescope. In seeking to explain the gap between the telescope's emergence and the alleged date of the astronomer's acquaintance with it, Reeves explores how and why information about the telescope was transmitted, suppressed, or misconstrued in the process. Her revised version of events, rejecting the usual explanations of silence and idleness, is a revealing account of the role that misprision, error, and preconception play in the advancement of science.Along the way, Reeves offers a revised chronology of Galileo's life in a critical period and, more generally, shows how documents typically outside the scope of early modern natural philosophy - medieval romances, travel literature, and idle speculations - relate to two crucial events in the history of science.  Sharing Widget |