HISTORY · SCIENCE
David Marcus Knight
Also known as: David Marcus Knight, David M. Knight
British historian of science and Professor of the History and Philosophy of Science at Durham University.
Most acclaimed
Voyaging In Strange Seas The Great Revolution In Science
In 1492 Columbus set out across the Atlantic; in 1776 American colonists declared their independence. Between these two events old authorities collapsed, Luther's Reformation divided churches, and various discoveries revealed the ignorance of the ancient Greeks and Romans. A new, empirical worldview had arrived, focusing now on observation, experiment, and mathematical reasoning. This book takes us along on the great voyage of discovery that ushered in the modern age. The author, a historian of science, locates the Scientific Revolution in the great era of global oceanic voyages, which became both a spur to and a metaphor for scientific discovery. He introduces the well-known heroes of the story (Galileo, Newton, Linnaeus) as well as lesser-recognized officers of scientific societies, printers and booksellers who turned scientific discovery into public knowledge, and editors who invented the scientific journal. He looks at a wide array of topics, from better maps to more accurate clocks, from a boom in printing to medical advancements. He portrays science and religion as engaged with each other rather than in constant conflict; in fact, science was often perceived as a way to uncover and celebrate God's mysteries and laws. -- From publisher's website.
Humphry Davy
1992
"In this illuminating and entertaining biography David Knight makes use of Humphry Davy's poetry, notebooks and informal writings to introduce us to one of the first professional scientists."--BOOK JACKET. "Davy is best remembered for his work on laughing gas, for the arc lamp, for isolating sodium and potassium, for his theory that chemical affinity is electrical and, of course, for his safety lamp. His lectures on science made the fortunes of the Royal Institution in London and he taught chemistry to the young Faraday. However, as well as making a career in science he is recognized for his poetry and was the friend of Coleridge, Wordsworth and Byron."--BOOK JACKET. "By investigating Humphry Davy's life David Knight shows what it was like to be a creative scientist in Regency Britain, demonstrating the development of science and its institutions during this crucial period in history."--BOOK JACKET.
Science and spirituality
"Until the end of the eighteenth century, almost everyone believed that the empirical world of science could produce evidence for a wise and loving God. By the twenty-first century, this comforting certainty had virtually vanished. Why? What caused such a cataclysmic change in attitudes to science and to the world?" "Science and Spirituality is the history of the interaction between Western science and faith, and of the sometimes productive and occasionally disastrous ways in which scientists have engaged with religious beliefs and institutions. It details the cultural and intellectual politics that ignited the descriptive 'cause' of science, eventually bringing about its ideological separation from its former ally, the Church." "Journeying from the French Revolution to the present day, and taking in such figures as Francis Bacon, Rene Descartes, Charles Darwin, Immanuel Kant, Albert Einstein, Mary Shelley and Stephen Hawking, David Knight shoes how science evolved from medieval and Renaissance forms of natural theology into the empirical discipline we know today. Focusing on the overthrow of Church and state in revolutionary France, and on the crucial nineteenth-century period when a newly emerging scientific community rendered science culturally accessible, Science and Spirituality explores the volatile connection between science and faith and challenges the myth of their being locked in inevitable conflict. The book shows how scientific disenchantment has provided some of our most flexible and powerful metaphors for God, such as the hidden puppet-master and the blind watchmaker, and illustrates the way in which questions of moral and spiritual value continue to intervene in the scientific endeavour."--BOOK JACKET.