SERVANTS OF NATURE
A History of Scientific Institutions, Enterprises and Sensibilities
LEWIS PYENSON
and
SUSAN SHEETS-PYENSON
Fourth Estate
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF
First published in Great Britain by
HarperCollinsPublishers 1999
Copyright © Lewis Pyenson and Susan Sheets-Pyenson 1999
Lewis Pyenson and Susan Sheets-Pyenson have asserted the moral right to be identified as the authors of this work
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
Source ISBN: 9780006862178
Ebook Edition © FEBRUARY 2016 ISBN 9780007394401
Version: 2016-01-08
HarperCollinsPublishers has made every reasonable effort to ensure that any picture content and written content in this ebook has been included or removed in accordance with the contractual and technological constraints in operation at the time of publication.
‘A considerable achievement.’ CASPAR HENDERSON, New Scientist
‘At best a heroic visionary, at worst a megalomaniac Frankenstein: either way triumphant individualism is taken for granted in the stereotypical scientist. So too is the disinterested purity of research conducted under lab conditions, all external considerations excluded like so many bacteria from a sterile vessel. Yet the reality has always been quite otherwise: the world refuses to stop at the laboratory door, and that has led to some of science’s greatest breakthroughs as well as its worst abuses. This highly readable, subtle and thought-provoking scientific history goes beyond whistle-blowing to consider more subtle and ultimately perhaps more interesting questions of how a changing institutional context has constrained the content and direction of we too unquestioningly take to be ‘pure’ science.’
Scotsman
CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION: Science and Its Past
The discipline of history of science
1 Teaching: Before the Scientific Revolution
2 Teaching: From the Time of the Scientific Revolution
The rise of the German university
The German research university in context
3 Sharing: Early Scientific Societies
Engines of the Scientific Revolution
The rise of the scientific correspondent
Nineteenth-century consolidation
The emergence of specialized societies
4 Watching: Observatories in the Middle East, China, Europe and America