Dawn of Modern Science explores the beginnings of science from the cosmology of ancient Greece to the cataclysmic conflict between the Medieval understanding of nature through spiritual contemplation and the Renaissance's revolutionary efforts to forge an awareness by observing and exploring the physical world. The author brings to life such figures as the Ionian exile Pythagoras, who developed the mathematical language by which we apprehend the intrinsic order of nature; al-Khwarizmi, court mathematician in the ninth century who developed the Arabic numerals; Roger Bacon, the Franciscan teacher and thinker who foresaw the machine age with stunning, prophetic vision; Dominican Albertus Magnus, whose studies of plant and animal life—made during long travels barefoot across northern Europe—laid the foundations of major empirical sciences; the aged astronomer and geographer Paolo Toscanelli, who measured the path of the sun on a cathedral floor and whose letter to Columbus launched the discovery of the New World; Leonardo da Vinci, the lonely genius of science and art, who personified the Renaissance, and its fascination with life itself. Across the centuries, Goldstein guides the reader through a shining intellectual pageant in a way that is both illuminating and unforgettable.

Looks at the history of science during the Renaissance, discusses the influence of the Islamic culture, and considers connections between art and science

In Shakespeare and the Dawn of Modern Science, renowned astronomy expert Peter Usher expands upon his allegorical interpretation of Hamlet and analyzes four more plays, Love's Labour's Lost, Cymbeline, The Merchant of Venice, and The Winter's Tale. With painstaking thoroughness, he dissects the plays and reveals that, contrary to current belief, Shakespeare was well aware of the scientific revolutions of his time. Moreover, Shakespeare imbeds in the allegorical subtext information on the appearances of the Sun, Moon, planets, and stars that he could not have known without telescopic aid, yet these plays appeared coeval with or prior to the commonly accepted date of 1610 for the invention and first use of the astronomical telescope. Dr. Usher argues that an early telescope, the so-called perspective glass, was the likely means for the acquisition of these data. This device was invented by the mathematician Leonard Digges, whose grandson of the same name contributed poems to the First and Second Folio editions of Shakespeare's plays. Shakespeare and the Dawn of Modern Science is an important addition to literature, history, and science collections as well as to personal libraries.

This lucid and captivating book takes the reader back to the early history of all the sciences, starting from antiquity and ending roughly at the time of Newton — covering the period which can legitimately be called the “dawn” of the sciences. Each of the 24 chapters focuses on a particular and significant development in the evolution of science, and is connected in a coherent way to the others to yield a smooth, continuous narrative. The at-a-glance diagrams showing the “When” and “Where” give a brief summary of what was happening at the time, thereby providing the broader context of the scientific events highlighted in that chapter. Embellished with colourful photographs and illustrations, and “boxed” highlights scattered throughout the text, this book is a must-read for everyone interested in the history of science, and how it shaped our world today.

This book is a study of the scientific revolution as a movement of amateur science. It describes the ideology of the amateur scientific societies as the philosophy of the Enlightenment Movement and their social structure and the way they made modern science such a magnificent institution. It also shows what was missing in the scientific organization of science and why it gave way to professional science in stages. In particular the book studies the contributions of Sir Francis Bacon and of the Hon. Robert Boyle to the rise of modern science. The philosophy of induction is notoriously problematic, yet its great asset is that it expressed the view of the Enlightenment Movement about science. This explains the ambivalence that we still exhibit towards Sir Francis Bacon whose radicalism and vision of pure and applied science still a major aspect of the fabric of society. Finally, the book discusses Boyle’s philosophy, his agreement with and dissent from Bacon and the way he single-handedly trained a crowd of poorly educated English aristocrats and rendered them into an army of able amateur researchers.