Difference between revisions of "Science Since Babylon"

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==Preface==
==Preface==
===to the Enlarged Edition===
===to the Enlarged Edition===
“Today as never before, our higher educational system and the cul­ture it enfolds teeter critically on a sharp division between education in the ancient sense of the term and a somewhat blatantly utilitarian viewpoint in which science is seen as a begetter of technological fixes for national needs.”
“Science is a very ex­ceptional and peculiar activity of all mankind, and one is not at liberty to regard it as that which can be applied to make technology.”
This new edition has 3 extra editions:
# The history of automata
## “[it] serves as a link between the development of clockwork and the mechanistic philosophy that has played a central role in the conceptual side of science.”
# The Geometrical amulets
## “Links science with magical pseudoscience”
# Relating science and technology
===to Original Edition===
===to Original Edition===
“I hoped, in addition, to show scientists that we ought to be able to talk about science with as much scholarly right as other humanists receive, and that our approach might (if successful) lead to a different or better understanding than one could get by just "doing” science.”
This book is entered around crises, vital decisions that had to be taken in order for civilization to turn out the way it did.
The 5 lectures this book is based on are broken down as follows:
# The crisis which set our civilization on the course of science, “thereby setting it apart from all other cultures.”
# “The departure of science from the realm of pure thought and its transformation into scientific technology.”
# Follows the “technological thread back into the web of Ren­aissance and modem science.”
# Pin-pointing “the stark transition from classical theories in the nineteenth century to the explosive multiplication of discoveries of the twentieth.”
# Attempting to guess a future transition from our current state of science to a “future internal economy of science that already looks quite different.”


== 1. The Peculiarity of a Scientific Civilization ==
== 1. The Peculiarity of a Scientific Civilization ==
6

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