Professor of the History of Science John L Heilbron's Books

The Sun in the Church

Cathedrals as Solar Observatories

By: J. L. Heilbron,Professor of the History of Science John L Heilbron

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The Sun in the Church

Cathedrals as Solar Observatories

By: J. L. Heilbron,Professor of the History of Science John L Heilbron

Between 1650 and 1750, four Catholic churches were the best solar observatories in the world. Built to fix an unquestionable date for Easter, they also housed instruments that threw light on the disputed geometry of the solar system, and so, within sight of the altar, subverted Church doctrine about the order of the universe. A tale of politically canny astronomers and cardinals with a taste for mathematics, "The Sun in the Church" tells how these observatories came to be, how they worked, and what they accomplished. It describes Galileo's political overreaching, his subsequent trial for heresy, and his slow and steady rehabilitation in the eyes of the Catholic Church. And it offers an enlightening perspective on astronomy, Church history, and religious architecture, as well as an analysis of measurements testing the limits of attainable accuracy, undertaken with rudimentary means and extraordinary zeal. Above all, the book illuminates the niches protected and financed by the Catholic Church in which science and mathematics thrived. Superbly written, "The Sun in the Church" provides a magnificent corrective to long-standing oversimplified accounts of the hostility between science and religion.

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376

Publisher

Harvard University Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0674038487

ISBN 13

9780674038486

Lawrence and His Laboratory

A History of the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory

By: J. L. Heilbron,Formerly Professor of History at University of California Berkeley Senior Research Fellow J L Heilbron,Robert W. Seidel

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Lawrence and His Laboratory

A History of the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory

By: J. L. Heilbron,Formerly Professor of History at University of California Berkeley Senior Research Fellow J L Heilbron,Robert W. Seidel

This is a first-rate contribution to the history of science and--in view of the central importance of physics for modern civilization--to the history of the twentieth century in general."--Spencer R. Weart, Center for History of Physics at the American Institute of Physics

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Page Count

660

Publisher

Univ of California Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0520064267

ISBN 13

9780520064263

Entropic Creation

Religious Contexts of Thermodynamics and Cosmology

By: Professor Helge S Kragh

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Entropic Creation

Religious Contexts of Thermodynamics and Cosmology

By: Professor Helge S Kragh

Entropic Creation is the first English-language book to consider the cultural and religious responses to the second law of thermodynamics, from around 1860 to 1920. According to the second law of thermodynamics, as formulated by the German physicist Rudolf Clausius, the entropy of any closed system will inevitably increase in time, meaning that the system will decay and eventually end in a dead state of equilibrium. Application of the law to the entire universe, first proposed in the 1850s, led to the prediction of a future 'heat death', where all life has ceased and all organization dissolved. In the late 1860s it was pointed out that, as a consequence of the heat death scenario, the universe can have existed only for a finite period of time. According to the 'entropic creation argument', thermodynamics warrants the conclusion that the world once begun or was created. It is these two scenarios, allegedly consequences of the science of thermodynamics, which form the core of this book. The heat death and the claim of cosmic creation were widely discussed in the period 1870 to 1920, with participants in the debate including European scientists, intellectuals and social critics, among them the physicist William Thomson and the communist thinker Friedrich Engels. One reason for the passion of the debate was that some authors used the law of entropy increase to argue for a divine creation of the world. Consequently, the second law of thermodynamics became highly controversial. In Germany in particular, materialists and positivists engaged in battle with Christian - mostly Catholic - scholars over the cosmological consequences of thermodynamics. This heated debate, which is today largely forgotten, is reconstructed and examined in detail in this book, bringing into focus key themes on the interactions between cosmology, physics, religion and ideology, and the public way in which these topics were discussed in the latter half of the nineteenth and the first years of the twentieth century.

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286

Publisher

Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.

Published Date

ISBN 10

1409474852

ISBN 13

9781409474852

Sudden Death: Medicine and Religion in Eighteenth-Century Rome

By: Professor Maria Pia Donato

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Sudden Death: Medicine and Religion in Eighteenth-Century Rome

By: Professor Maria Pia Donato

In 1705-1706, during the War of the Spanish Succession and two years after a devastating earthquake, an ‘epidemic’ of mysterious sudden deaths terrorized Rome. In early modern society, a sudden death was perceived as a mala mors because it threatened the victim’s salvation by hindering repentance and last confession. Special masses were celebrated to implore God’s clemency and Pope Clement XI ordered his personal physician, Giovanni Maria Lancisi, to perform a series of dissections in the university anatomical theatre in order to discover the 'true causes' of the deadly events. It was the first investigation of this kind ever to take place for a condition which was not contagious. The book that Lancisi published on this topic, De subitaneis mortibus (‘On Sudden Deaths’, 1707), is one of the earliest modern scientific investigations of death; it was not only an accomplished example of mechanical philosophy as applied to the life sciences in eighteenth-century Europe, but also heralded a new pathological anatomy (traditionally associated with Giambattista Morgagni). Moreover, Lancisi’s tract and the whole affair of the sudden deaths in Rome marked a significant break in the traditional attitude towards dying, introducing a more active approach that would later develop into the practice of resuscitation medicine. Sudden Death explores how a new scientific interpretation of death and a new attitude towards dying first came into being, breaking free from the Hippocratic tradition, which regarded death as the obvious limit of physician’s capacity, and leading the way to a belief in the 'conquest of death' by medicine which remains in force to this day.

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Page Count

241

Publisher

Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.

Published Date

ISBN 10

1472418751

ISBN 13

9781472418753

The Sun in the Church

Cathedrals as Solar Observatories

By: J. L. Heilbron,Professor of the History of Science John L Heilbron

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The Sun in the Church

Cathedrals as Solar Observatories

By: J. L. Heilbron,Professor of the History of Science John L Heilbron

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Solve jigsaw puzzle

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Page Count

376

Publisher

Harvard University Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0674038487

ISBN 13

9780674038486

Book's by Professor of the History of Science John L Heilbron

The Sun in the Church

The Sun in the Church

Lawrence and His Laboratory

Lawrence and His Laboratory

Entropic Creation

Entropic Creation

Sudden Death: Medicine and Religion in Eighteenth-Century Rome

Sudden Death: Medicine and Religion in Eighteenth-Century Rome

The Sun in the Church

The Sun in the Church

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