I recently realized that I think the stuff I already know about the history of science, math, etc., is really inherently interesting and fascinating to me, but that I’ve never actually thought about going out of my way to learn more on the subject. Does anybody on here have one really good book on the subject to recommend? I’ve already read Science and the Enlightenment by Hankins.
The Copernican Revolution, by Kuhn is one of the best science histories I’ve ever read.
The folk-tale version of how we adopted heliocentric cosmology is something like this: “Aristotle and Ptolemy thought the world was arranged as concentric crystalline spheres. Copernicus proposed a new model that better fit the data, and it was opposed by the Church. Ultimately thanks to the Reformation and the Enlightenment, the correct model won out.”
None of those claims is right, and Kuhn does a great job explaining the true story. He explains what problem Copernicus thought he was solving and how well he solved it.
I second the recommendation of The Copernican Revolution, and suggest another book on the same topic: Arthur Koestler’s The Sleepwalkers.
Koestler was a great novelist (his best known novel, Darkness at Noon, rivals 1984 in its portrayal of totalitarian thought) and a brilliant, eclectic and sometimes bizarre thinker. The Sleepwalkers is a grand history of astronomy and cosmology from ancient times to Newton, with the bulk of the focus on Copernicus, Kepler and Galileo.
Pros: Fascinating and very detailed biographical information on these three figures (and others like Tycho Brahe), presented in a way that reads like a novel, indeed a page-turner. His biography of Kepler is especially unforgettable, very different from a dry academic presentation. The historical presentation is peppered with opinionated philosophical and even sociological detours.
Cons: unbalanced covering of different topics, subjective and somewhat biased viewpoints. In particular, his interpretation of the relationship between Kepler and Galileo, and of Galileo’s dealings with the Church, is colored by what seems to be a strong personal dislike of Galileo. His interpretation of the reasons why the heliocentric model was rejected in ancient times is also unreliable.
As long as his interpretations are taken with a grain of salt (or balanced with a more objective presentation like Kuhn’s) I would definitely recommend it; it is the most enjoyable book on history of science I have read.
According to him, the ancient heliocentric model of Aristarchus was clearly superior in simplicity and predictive power to the geocentric models of Ptolemy and others, and was abandoned for irrational reasons (religiously or ideologically motivated). From what I understand, the mainstream academic position is that, analyzed in context and without hindsight, the ancient rejection of the heliocentric theory was quite reasonable. Previous discussion in Less Wrong.
I think it is better to say that the rejection could have been reasonable, that we cannot rule out that possibility, not that we can rule out the possibility that it was not reasonable.
My interpretation is that Hipparchus was geocentric, perhaps for good reason, and everyone else was geocentric the bad reason that Hipparchus had data, and data was high status, not because they were convinced by the data. In any event, his data does not rule out the distances Archimedes proposes in the Sand Reckoner, probably following Aristarchus. But I don’t think it is even really established that Hipparchus was geocentric, just that Ptolemy said so.
Update: Nope, history is bullshit. Hipparchus was not geocentric. Maybe Ptolemy said he was, but what did he know? Other ancient sources say that he refused to pick sides, not knowing how to distinguish the hypotheses. At the very least this shows that the heliocentric hypothesis was alive and well. Asking why they discarded it is wrong question. Frankly, I’m with Russo: the heliocentric hypothesis was standard.
Possibly I should add that I read that when I was quite young (13ish?) and haven’t reread since. It doesn’t contain anything remotely resembling advanced maths—it’s definitely about history and the philosophy of the concept. I obviously found it memorable though, so although the writing may have been so terrible I didn’t notice at 13, it’s unlikely.
I recently realized that I think the stuff I already know about the history of science, math, etc., is really inherently interesting and fascinating to me, but that I’ve never actually thought about going out of my way to learn more on the subject. Does anybody on here have one really good book on the subject to recommend? I’ve already read Science and the Enlightenment by Hankins.
The Copernican Revolution, by Kuhn is one of the best science histories I’ve ever read.
The folk-tale version of how we adopted heliocentric cosmology is something like this: “Aristotle and Ptolemy thought the world was arranged as concentric crystalline spheres. Copernicus proposed a new model that better fit the data, and it was opposed by the Church. Ultimately thanks to the Reformation and the Enlightenment, the correct model won out.”
None of those claims is right, and Kuhn does a great job explaining the true story. He explains what problem Copernicus thought he was solving and how well he solved it.
I agree that it is a good book. But it helps to be aware that Kuhn substantially simplifies a lot of what is going on. See for example here and here.
Awesome! I loved Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific Revolutions, and it seems like an interesting subject, besides.
I second the recommendation of The Copernican Revolution, and suggest another book on the same topic: Arthur Koestler’s The Sleepwalkers.
Koestler was a great novelist (his best known novel, Darkness at Noon, rivals 1984 in its portrayal of totalitarian thought) and a brilliant, eclectic and sometimes bizarre thinker. The Sleepwalkers is a grand history of astronomy and cosmology from ancient times to Newton, with the bulk of the focus on Copernicus, Kepler and Galileo.
Pros: Fascinating and very detailed biographical information on these three figures (and others like Tycho Brahe), presented in a way that reads like a novel, indeed a page-turner. His biography of Kepler is especially unforgettable, very different from a dry academic presentation. The historical presentation is peppered with opinionated philosophical and even sociological detours.
Cons: unbalanced covering of different topics, subjective and somewhat biased viewpoints. In particular, his interpretation of the relationship between Kepler and Galileo, and of Galileo’s dealings with the Church, is colored by what seems to be a strong personal dislike of Galileo. His interpretation of the reasons why the heliocentric model was rejected in ancient times is also unreliable.
As long as his interpretations are taken with a grain of salt (or balanced with a more objective presentation like Kuhn’s) I would definitely recommend it; it is the most enjoyable book on history of science I have read.
Could you elaborate?
According to him, the ancient heliocentric model of Aristarchus was clearly superior in simplicity and predictive power to the geocentric models of Ptolemy and others, and was abandoned for irrational reasons (religiously or ideologically motivated). From what I understand, the mainstream academic position is that, analyzed in context and without hindsight, the ancient rejection of the heliocentric theory was quite reasonable. Previous discussion in Less Wrong.
I think it is better to say that the rejection could have been reasonable, that we cannot rule out that possibility, not that we can rule out the possibility that it was not reasonable.
My interpretation is that Hipparchus was geocentric, perhaps for good reason, and everyone else was geocentric the bad reason that Hipparchus had data, and data was high status, not because they were convinced by the data. In any event, his data does not rule out the distances Archimedes proposes in the Sand Reckoner, probably following Aristarchus. But I don’t think it is even really established that Hipparchus was geocentric, just that Ptolemy said so.
Update: Nope, history is bullshit. Hipparchus was not geocentric. Maybe Ptolemy said he was, but what did he know? Other ancient sources say that he refused to pick sides, not knowing how to distinguish the hypotheses. At the very least this shows that the heliocentric hypothesis was alive and well. Asking why they discarded it is wrong question. Frankly, I’m with Russo: the heliocentric hypothesis was standard.
I really enjoyed The Nothing That Is by Robert Kaplan. It’s about the history of the concept (and the numeral) zero.
Possibly I should add that I read that when I was quite young (13ish?) and haven’t reread since. It doesn’t contain anything remotely resembling advanced maths—it’s definitely about history and the philosophy of the concept. I obviously found it memorable though, so although the writing may have been so terrible I didn’t notice at 13, it’s unlikely.