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Science Since Babylon: Difference between revisions
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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 == | ||