This chapter contains sections titled: Highlights of Past Literature Current Work Future Work.

Some time in the late 1590s, the Welsh amateur mathematician John Bulkeley wrote to Thomas Harriot asking his opinion about the properties of a truly gargantuan (but totally imaginary) plano-spherical convex lens, 48 feet in diameter. While Bulkeley’s original letter is lost, Harriot devoted several pages to the optical properties of “Mr Bulkeley his Glasse” in his optical papers (now in British Library MS Add. 6789), paying particular attention to the place of its burning point. Harriot’s calculational methods in these (...) papers are almost unique in Harriot’s optical remains, in that he uses both the sine law of refraction and interpolation from Witelo’s refraction tables in order to analyze the passage of light through the glass. For this and other reasons, it is very likely that Harriot wrote his papers on Bulkeley’s glass very shortly after his discovery of the law and while still working closely with Witelo’s great Optics; the papers represent, perhaps, his very first application of the law. His and Bulkeley’s interest in this giant glass conform to a long English tradition of curiosity about the optical and burning properties of large glasses, which grew more intense in late sixteenth-century England. In particular, Thomas Digges’s bold and widely known assertions about his father’s glasses that could see things several miles distant and could burn objects a half-mile or further away may have attracted Harriot and Bulkeley’s skeptical attention; for Harriot’s analysis of the burning distance and the intensity of Bulkeley’s fantastic lens, it shows that Digges’s claims could never have been true about any real lens (and this, I propose, was what Bulkeley had asked about in his original letter to Harriot). There was also a deeper, mathematical relevance to the problem that may have caught Harriot’s attention. His most recent source on refraction—Giambattista della Porta’s De refractione of 1593—identified a mathematical flaw in Witelo’s cursory suggestion about the optics of a lens (the only place that lenses appear, however fleetingly, in the writings of the thirteenth-century Perspectivist authors). In his early notes on optics, in a copy of Witelo’s optics, Harriot highlighted Witelo’s remarks on the lens and della Porta’s criticism (which he found unsatisfactory). The most significant problem with Witelo’s theorem would disappear as the radius of curvature of the lens approached infinity. Bulkeley’s gigantic glass, then, may have provided Harriot an opportunity to test out Witelo’s claims about a plano-spherical glass, at a time when he was still intensely concerned with the problems and methods of the Perspectivist school. (shrink)

Katherine Jones, Lady Ranelagh (1615–91), Robert Boyle's older sister with whom he lived for the last 23 years of his life, has lurked in the shadows of the historical record since their deaths in...

ArgumentEarly modern Europeans routinely compared nature to a theater or spectacle, so it makes sense to examine the practices of observing real spectacles and performances in order to better comprehend acts of witnessing nature. Using examples from the history of fireworks, this essay explores acts of observing natural and artificial spectacles between the sixteenth and late eighteenth centuries and suggests these acts of observation were mutually constitutive and entailed ongoing and diverse exchanges. The essay follows the changing ways in which (...) audiences were imagined or expected to react to fireworks and shows how these also shaped experiences of natural phenomena. Both natural and artificial spectacles were intended to teach morals about the state and nature, yet audiences rarely seemed to take away what they were expected to learn. The essay examines how performers thus sought to discipline audience observation, before exploring, in conclusion, how spectacle provided a vocabulary for discerning and articulating new natural phenomena, and sites for the pursuit of novel experiments. (shrink)

Purpose With the increasing sophistication of neuroimaging technologies in medicine, new language is being sought to make sense of the findings. The aim of this paper is to explore whether the brain-reading metaphor used to convey current medical or neurobiological findings imports unintended significations that do not necessarily reflect the genuine findings made by physicians and neuroscientists. Methods First, the paper surveys the ambiguities of the readability metaphor, drawing from the history of science and medicine, paying special attention to the (...) sixteenth through nineteenth centuries. Next, the paper addresses more closely the issue of how metaphors may be confusing when used in medicine in general, and neuroscience in particular. The paper then explores the possible misleading effects associated with the contemporary use of the brain-reading metaphor in neuroimaging research. Results Rather than breaking new ground, what we see in current scientific language is a persistence of both a constraining and expansive set of language practices forming a relatively continuous tradition linking current neuroimaging to past scientific investigations into the brain. Conclusions The use of the readability metaphor thus carries with it both positive and negative effects. Physicians and neuroscientists must resort to the use of terms already laden with abstracted meanings, and often burdened by tradition, at the risk of importing through these words connotations that do not tally with the sought-after objectivity of empirical science. (shrink)

“Chance as a Positive Space of Indetermination in the Thomistic Assimilation of Aristotle’s Physics”. This article analyzes Thomas Aquinas’s assimilation of the Aristotelian theory of chance. The analysis highlights Thomas Aquinas’s unequivocal acceptance of Aristotelian philosophy, as well as the issues regarding which he abandoned the Aristotelian position by offering a new interpretation related to the role of chance in the context of the created cosmos. All in all, the confluence of these two great systems of thought –Aristotelian thought and (...) late Medieval Christianity– provided new ways to understand nature, by expanding the scope of physics from the absolutely determined to the anomalous and irregular. (shrink)

Curiosity is a wonder of the human mind. It goes to the heart of modernity, as a driving force for learning, novel insights, and innovation, both for individuals and communities. In societies dependent on science and development, finding out what promotes or hampers curiosity and wonder in school curricula and science education is accordingly essential. In this conceptual article, I suggest a framework for curiosity-based science education and I explore options for its wellbeing and development during preschool, preadolescence, and adolescence. (...) In preschool, curiosity and wonder are triggered by perceptive beauty rather than by facts, and a method emphasizing maximism as a complementary factor in preschool science education is proposed. In prepuberty, curiosity is encouraged by exploring the diversity of the world. Facts and clear-cut knowledge constitute a firm foundation for scientific thinking. In high school, curiosity is ignited by means of a better balance between models and phenomenology. Criticism has arisen over the one-sided use of models in high school science education, which limits scientific thinking to frameworks defined by the actual model. Possible solutions to maintain students’ curiosity and ideas to improve the balance between phenomenology and models are discussed. (shrink)

The sixteenth century could be understand as a period of renaissance of interest in nature and as a period of development of natural history as a discipline. The spreading of the printing press was connected to the preparation of new editions of Classical texts and to the act of correcting and commenting on these texts. This forced scholars to confront texts with living nature and to subject it to more careful investigation. The discovery of America uncovered new horizons and brought (...) new natural products, which were exotic and unknown to Classical tradition. The aim of this study is to compare strategies and categories, which were used in describing plants of the Old and the New World. Attention will be paid to the first reactions to the new flora, to the methods of naming and describing plants, to the ways of gaining knowledge about plants from local sources or by means of one’s own observation. The confrontation with novelty puts naturalists in the Old World and in the New World in a similar situation. It reveals the limits of traditional knowledge based on Classical authorities. A closer investigation, however, brings to light not only the sometimes unexpected similarities, but also the differences which were due to the radical otherness of American plants. (shrink)

The increased interest in contemporary relations of culture and governance that has been prompted by the post-Foucauldian literature on governmentality has paid insufficient attention to the need to redefine the concept of culture, and to rethink its relation to the social, that such work requires. This paper contributes to such an endeavour by arguing the need to eschew the view that culture works by some general mechanism in order to focus on the ways in which specific cultural knowledges are translated (...) into distinctive technical and operational forms in the context of particular institutions and programmes of governance. In doing so, it draws on the perspectives of science studies and actor network theory and applies these to examine how the fabrication of the prehistoric past that resulted from the endeavours of the nineteenthcentury historical sciences was translated into distinctive technical forms in the context of typological museum displays. These developments are related to the changing objectives of liberal government and the emergence of an archaeologized structure of the self. (shrink)

According to the received view, the first spyglass was assembled without any theory of how the instrument magnifies. Galileo, who was the first to use the device as a scientific instrument, improved the power of magnification up to 30 times. How did he accomplish this feat? Galileo does not tell us what he did. We hold that such improvement of magnification is too intricate a problem to be solved by trial and error, accidentally stumbling upon a complex procedure. We construct (...) a plausibility argument and submit that Galileo had a theory of the telescope. He could develop it by analogical reasoning based on the phenomenon of reflection in mirrors—as it was put to use in surveying instruments—and applied to refraction in sets of lenses. Galileo could appeal to this analogy and assume Della Porta’s theory of refraction. He could thus turn the spyglass into a revolutionary scientific instrument—the telescope. (shrink)