The World as We Know It: From Natural Philosophy to Modern Science

In this mundane history, Dear (Revolutionizing the Sciences), a professor emeritus of history at Cornell University, unpacks the origins of major scientific achievements between the 17th and 20th centuries, arguing science is not a free-floating “’thing’ waiting to be discovered” but rather an enterprise molded by people, culture, and institutions. Dear explains how the immediate success of Isaac Newton’s writings about the laws of motion and gravitation was due to their religious value; soon after Newton’s Principia was published in England in 1687, Anglican presbyters began citing it as proof of “God and His rule over Creation.” Similarly, the system of classifying and naming organisms developed by Carl Linnaeus in the 18th century gained its hold, according to Dear, not only because it was easy to use but because both church and state saw that it reflected “God’s blueprint for creation.” Even Charles Darwin’s controversial ideas on evolution won acceptance in Victorian society, not necessarily on their own merit, but because anthropologists could use them, erroneously, to show how far down the evolutionary ladder non-European folk were from their Victorian kin. Dear goes on to explore later milestones in thermodynamics, quantum mechanics, and astronomy. Unfortunately, his technical summaries are dry and sometimes stylistically awkward. Even with some interesting insights, this ends up reading like a rather bland expansion of the history prologues found in science textbooks. Illus. (Oct.)