Isaac Newton'sChronology of Ancient Kingdoms Amended, published in 1728, one year after the great man's death, unleashed a storm of controversy. And for good reason. The book presents a drastically ...revised timeline for ancient civilizations, contracting Greek history by five hundred years and Egypt's by a millennium.Newton and the Origin of Civilizationtells the story of how one of the most celebrated figures in the history of mathematics, optics, and mechanics came to apply his unique ways of thinking to problems of history, theology, and mythology, and of how his radical ideas produced an uproar that reverberated in Europe's learned circles throughout the eighteenth century and beyond.
Jed Buchwald and Mordechai Feingold reveal the manner in which Newton strove for nearly half a century to rectify universal history by reading ancient texts through the lens of astronomy, and to create a tight theoretical system for interpreting the evolution of civilization on the basis of population dynamics. It was during Newton's earliest years at Cambridge that he developed the core of his singular method for generating and working with trustworthy knowledge, which he applied to his study of the past with the same rigor he brought to his work in physics and mathematics. Drawing extensively on Newton's unpublished papers and a host of other primary sources, Buchwald and Feingold reconcile Isaac Newton the rational scientist with Newton the natural philosopher, alchemist, theologian, and chronologist of ancient history.
The clash of faith and science in Napoleonic FranceThe Dendera zodiac-an ancient bas-relief temple ceiling adorned with mysterious symbols of the stars and planets-was first discovered by the French ...during Napoleon's campaign in Egypt, and quickly provoked a controversy between scientists and theologians. Brought to Paris in 1821 and ultimately installed in the Louvre, where it can still be seen today, the zodiac appeared to depict the nighttime sky from a time predating the Biblical creation, and therefore cast doubt on religious truth. The Zodiac of Paris tells the story of this incredible archeological find and its unlikely role in the fierce disputes over science and faith in Napoleonic and Restoration France.The book unfolds against the turbulence of the French Revolution, Napoleon's breathtaking rise and fall, and the restoration of the Bourbons to the throne. Drawing on newspapers, journals, diaries, pamphlets, and other documentary evidence, Jed Buchwald and Diane Greco Josefowicz show how scientists and intellectuals seized upon the zodiac to discredit Christianity, and how this drew furious responses from conservatives and sparked debates about the merits of scientific calculation as a source of knowledge about the past. The ideological battles would rage until the thoroughly antireligious Jean-François Champollion unlocked the secrets of Egyptian hieroglyphs-and of the zodiac itself. Champollion would prove the religious reactionaries right, but for all the wrong reasons.The Zodiac of Paris brings Napoleonic and Restoration France vividly to life, revealing the lengths to which scientists, intellectuals, theologians, and conservatives went to use the ancient past for modern purposes.
Einstein Was Right Buonanno, Alessandra; Thorne, Kip S; Collins, Harry ...
2020, 2020-10-13
eBook
An authoritative interdisciplinary account of the historic discovery of gravitational waves In 1915, Albert Einstein predicted the existence of gravitational waves—ripples in the fabric of spacetime ...caused by the movement of large masses—as part of the theory of general relativity. A century later, researchers with the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) confirmed Einstein's prediction, detecting gravitational waves generated by the collision of two black holes. Shedding new light on the hundred-year history of this momentous achievement, Einstein Was Right brings together essays by two of the physicists who won the Nobel Prize for their instrumental roles in the discovery, along with contributions by leading scholars who offer unparalleled insights into one of the most significant scientific breakthroughs of our time.This illuminating book features an introduction by Tilman Sauer and invaluable firsthand perspectives on the history and significance of the LIGO consortium by physicists Barry Barish and Kip Thorne. Theoretical physicist Alessandra Buonanno discusses the new possibilities opened by gravitational wave astronomy, and sociologist of science Harry Collins and historians of science Diana Kormos Buchwald, Daniel Kennefick, and Jürgen Renn provide further insights into the history of relativity and LIGO. The book closes with a reflection by philosopher Don Howard on the significance of Einstein's theory for the philosophy of science.Edited by Jed Buchwald, Einstein Was Right is a compelling and thought-provoking account of one of the most thrilling scientific discoveries of the modern age.
A major new history of the race between two geniuses to decipher ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs, set against the backdrop of nineteenth-century Europe In 1799, a French Army officer was rebuilding the ...defenses of a fort on the banks of the Nile when he discovered an ancient stele fragment bearing a decree inscribed in three different scripts. So begins one of the most familiar tales in Egyptology—that of the Rosetta Stone and the decipherment of Egyptian hieroglyphs. This book draws on fresh archival evidence to provide a major new account of how the English polymath Thomas Young and the French philologist Jean-François Champollion vied to be the first to solve the riddle of the Rosetta.Jed Buchwald and Diane Greco Josefowicz bring to life a bygone age of intellectual adventure. Much more than a decoding exercise centered on a single artifact, the race to decipher the Rosetta Stone reflected broader disputes about language, historical evidence, biblical truth, and the value of classical learning. Buchwald and Josefowicz paint compelling portraits of Young and Champollion, two gifted intellects with altogether different motivations. Young disdained Egyptian culture and saw Egyptian writing as a means to greater knowledge about Greco-Roman antiquity. Champollion, swept up in the political chaos of Restoration France and fiercely opposed to the scholars aligned with throne and altar, admired ancient Egypt and was prepared to upend conventional wisdom to solve the mystery of the hieroglyphs.Taking readers from the hushed lecture rooms of the Institut de France to the windswept monuments of the Valley of the Kings, The Riddle of the Rosetta reveals the untold story behind one of the nineteenth century's most thrilling discoveries.
A major new history of the race between two geniuses to
decipher ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs, set against the backdrop of
nineteenth-century Europe In 1799, a French Army officer
was rebuilding the ...defenses of a fort on the banks of the Nile when
he discovered an ancient stele fragment bearing a decree inscribed
in three different scripts. So begins one of the most familiar
tales in Egyptology-that of the Rosetta Stone and the decipherment
of Egyptian hieroglyphs. This book draws on fresh archival evidence
to provide a major new account of how the English polymath Thomas
Young and the French philologist Jean-Fran??ois Champollion vied to
be the first to solve the riddle of the Rosetta. Jed Buchwald and
Diane Greco Josefowicz bring to life a bygone age of intellectual
adventure. Much more than a decoding exercise centered on a single
artifact, the race to decipher the Rosetta Stone reflected broader
disputes about language, historical evidence, biblical truth, and
the value of classical learning. Buchwald and Josefowicz paint
compelling portraits of Young and Champollion, two gifted
intellects with altogether different motivations. Young disdained
Egyptian culture and saw Egyptian writing as a means to greater
knowledge about Greco-Roman antiquity. Champollion, swept up in the
political chaos of Restoration France and fiercely opposed to the
scholars aligned with throne and altar, admired ancient Egypt and
was prepared to upend conventional wisdom to solve the mystery of
the hieroglyphs. Taking readers from the hushed lecture rooms of
the Institut de France to the windswept monuments of the Valley of
the Kings, The Riddle of the Rosetta reveals the untold
story behind one of the nineteenth century's most thrilling
discoveries.
The pressures of politics, the desire to be first in innovation, moral convictions, and the potential dangers of error are all factors that have long been at work in the history of science and ...technology. Every so often, the need to reach a result may require leaving out a few steps here and there. Historians think and argue best through stories, so what follows are several tales, each of which exemplifies one or more of these aspects, though some reach back nearly two hundred years. The first concerns the depletion of the ozone layer; the second involves the discovery of electric waves by Heinrich Hertz in 1888; the third concerns the controlled production of electromagnetic radiation by Guglielmo Marconi and John Ambrose Fleming in the early 1900s; the fourth portrays the circumstances surrounding Joseph von Fraunhofer’s discovery and use of the spectral lines in the 1810s; our final case involves a bitter controversy between the physicist Hermann von Helmholtz and the astronomer Friedrich Zöllner in the 1890s.
The decipherment of Egyptian hieroglyphs has captured the interest and fascination of both scholars and the public for nearly two centuries. The discovery of the Rosetta Stone by Napoleon’s force in ...Egypt, the drama of its ceding to the British and eventual transfer to the British Museum, followed two decades later by the decipherment of the scripts are perhaps the most widely known and written about events in the history of European engagement with antiquity. The first accounts of the deciph...
Kirchhoff's 1882 theory of optical diffraction forms the centerpiece in the long-term development of wave optics, one that commenced in the 1820s when Fresnel produced an empirically successful ...theory based on a reinterpretation of Huygens' principle, but without working from a wave equation. Then, in 1856, Stokes demonstrated that the principle was derivable from such an equation albeit without consideration of boundary conditions. Kirchhoff's work a quarter century later marked a crucial, and widely influential, point for he produced Fresnel's results by means of Green's theorem and function under specific boundary conditions. In the late 1880s, Poincaré uncovered an inconsistency between Kirchhoff's conditions and his solution, one that seemed to imply that waves should not exist at all. Researchers nevertheless continued to use Kirchhoff's theory—even though Rayleigh, and much later Sommerfeld, developed a different and mathematically consistent formulation that, however, did not match experimental data better than Kirchhoff's theory. After all, Kirchhoff's formula worked quite well in a specific approximation regime. Finally, in 1964, Marchand and Wolf employed the transformation of Kirchhoff's surface integral that had been developed by Maggi and Rubinowicz for other purposes. The result yielded a consistent boundary condition that, while introducing a species of discontinuity, nevertheless rescued the essential structure of Kirchhoff's original formulation from Poincaré's paradox.
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