The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science [Bargain Price] by Richard Holmes (Author). A riveting historical past of the women and men whose discoveries and inventions on the end of the eighteenth century gave deliver to the Romantic Age of Science.
When young Joseph Banks stepped onto a Tahitian seaside in 1769, he hoped to discover Paradise. Impressed by the scientific ferment sweeping by Britain, the botanist had sailed with Captain Prepare dinner on his first Endeavour voyage in the hunt for new worlds. Different voyages of discovery-astronomical, chemical, poetical, philosophical-swiftly observe in Richard Holmes’s authentic evocation of what actually emerges as an Age of Wonder.
Brilliantly conceived as a relay of scientific tales, The Age of Surprise investigates the earliest ideas of deep time and area, and the explorers of “dynamic science,” of an infinite, mysterious Nature ready to be discovered. Three lives dominate the e-book: William Herschel and his sister Caroline, whose dedication to the research of the celebs endlessly changed the general public conception of the solar system, the Milky Way, and the that means of the universe; and Humphry Davy, who, with solely a grammar faculty schooling surprised the scientific community together with his near-suicidal gasoline experiments that led to the invention of the miners’ lamp and established British chemistry because the leading skilled science in Europe. This age of exploration prolonged to great writers and poets in addition to scientists, all creators relishing in moments of excessive exhilaration, boundary-pushing and discovery.
Holmes’s extraordinary evocation of this age of wonder exhibits how nice ideas and experiments-each successes and failures-were born of singular and often lonely dedication, and how spiritual faith and scientific fact collide. He has written a book breathtaking in its originality, its storytelling vitality, and its mental significance.
This is a marvelous ebook, depicting a period where scientific work was far completely different than it is now. One didn't need years of coaching or enormous government funding to make a significant discovery back then, however moderately laborious work and ingenuity. For example, a novice like William Hershel, a composer and instrument-maker might turn out to be the best astronomer of his generation. What's extra, the discoveries were intelligible to all educated males of the time and will affect the arts, as we see from scientific feedback of writers akin to Samuel Johnson, Coleridge, Keats, Shelley. Who would ever have recognized that the writer of the RIME OF THE ANCIENT MARINER also coined the word "psychosomatic" and should have coined the phrase "scientist"? The author of this ebook did.
The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and
Terror of Science [Bargain Price]
Richard Holmes (Author)
576 pages
Pantheon (July 14, 2009)
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