To Explain the World: The Discovery of Modern Science (64 page)

24
. This letter is widely cited. The translation quoted here is from Duhem,
To Save the Phenomena
, p. 107. A fuller translation is given in Stillman Drake,
Discoveries and Opinions of Galileo
(Anchor, New York, 1957), pp. 162–64.

25
. A translation of the entire letter is given in Drake,
Discoveries and Opinions of Galileo
, pp. 175–216.

26
. Quoted in Stillman Drake,
Galileo
(Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1980), p. 64.

27
. The letters of Maria Celeste to her father fortunately survive. Many are quoted in Dava Sobel,
Galileo’s Daughter
(Walker, New York, 1999). Alas, Galileo’s letters to his daughters are lost.

28
. See Annibale Fantoli,
Galileo—For Copernicanism and for the Church
, 2nd ed., trans. G. V. Coyne (University of Notre Dame Press, South Bend, Ind., 1996); Maurice A. Finocchiaro,
Retrying Galileo, 1633–1992
(University of California Press, Berkeley and Los Angeles, 2005).

29
. Quoted in Drake,
Galileo
, p. 90.

30
. Quoted by Gingerich,
Tribute to Galileo
, p. 343.

31
. I made a statement to this effect at the same meeting in Padua where Kuhn made the remarks about Aristotle cited in Chapter 4
and where Gingerich gave the talk about Galileo from which I have quoted here. See S. Weinberg, in
L’Anno Galileiano
(Edizioni LINT, Trieste, 1995), p. 129.

12. Experiments Begun

1
. See G. E. R. Lloyd,
Proceedings of the Cambridge Philosophical Society
, N.S.
10
, 50 (1972), reprinted in
Methods and Problems in Greek Science
(Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1991).

2
. Galileo Galilei,
Two New Sciences
, trans. Stillman Drake (University of Wisconsin Press, Madison, 1974), p. 68.

3
. Stillman Drake,
Galileo
(Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1980), p. 33.

4
. T. B. Settle, “An Experiment in the History of Science,”
Science
133
, 19 (1961).

5
. This is Drake’s conclusion in the endnote to p. 259 of Galileo Galilei,
Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems: Ptolemaic and Copernican
, trans. Stillman Drake (Modern Library, New York, 2001).

6
. Our knowledge of this experiment is based on an unpublished document, folio 116v, in Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale, Florence. See Stillman Drake,
Galileo at Work—His Scientific Biography
(University of Chicago Press, Chicago, Ill., 1978), pp. 128–32; A. J. Hahn, “The Pendulum Swings Again: A Mathematical Reassessment of Galileo’s Experiments with Inclined Planes,”
Archive for the History of the Exact Sciences
56
, 339 (2002), with a reproduction of the folio on p. 344.

7
. Carlo M. Cipolla,
Clocks and Culture 1300–1700
(W. W. Norton, New York, 1978), pp. 59, 138.

8
. Christiaan Huygens,
The Pendulum Clock or Geometrical Demonstrations Concerning the Motion of Pendula as Applied to Clocks
, trans. Richard J. Blackwell (Iowa State University Press, Ames, 1986), p. 171.

9
. This measurement was described in detail by Alexandre Koyré in
Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society
97
, 222 (1953) and
45
, 329 (1955). Also see Christopher M. Graney, “Anatomy of a Fall: Giovanni Battista Riccioli and the Story of
g
,”
Physics Today
, September 2012, pp. 36–40.

10
. On the controversy over these conservation laws, see G. E. Smith, “The Vis-Viva Dispute: A Controversy at the Dawn of Mathematics,”
Physics Today
, October 2006, p. 31.

11
. Christiaan Huygens,
Treatise on Light
, trans. Silvanus P. Thompson (University of Chicago Press, Chicago, Ill., 1945), p. vi.

12
. Quoted by Steven Shapin in
The Scientific Revolution
(University of Chicago Press, Chicago, Ill., 1996), p. 105.

13
. Ibid., p. 185.

13. Method Reconsidered

1
. See articles on Leonardo in
Dictionary of Scientific Biography
, ed. Charles Coulston Gillespie (Scribner, New York, 1970), Volume 8, pp. 192–245.

2
. Quotations are from René Descartes,
Principles of Philosophy
, trans. V. R. Miller and R. P. Miller (D. Reidel, Dordrecht, 1983), p. 15.

3
. Voltaire,
Philosophical Letters
, trans. E. Dilworth (Bobbs-Merrill Educational Publishing, Indianapolis, Ind., 1961), p. 64.

4
. It is odd that many modern English language editions of
Discourse on Method
leave out these supplements, as if they would not be of interest to philosophers. For an edition that does include them, see René Descartes,
Discourse on Method, Optics, Geometry, and Meteorology
, trans. Paul J. Olscamp (Bobbs-Merrill, Indianapolis, Ind., 1965). The Descartes quote and the numerical results below are from this edition.

5
. It is argued that the tennis ball analogy fits well with Descartes’ theory of light as arising from the dynamics of the tiny corpuscles that fill space; see John A. Schuster, “Descartes
Opticien
—The Construction of the Law of Refraction and the Manufacture of Its Physical Rationales, 1618–29,” in
Descartes’ Natural Philosophy
, ed. S. Graukroger, J. Schuster, and J. Sutton (Routledge, London and New York, 2000), pp. 258–312.

6
. Aristotle,
Meteorology
, Book III, Chapter 4, 374a, 30–31 (Oxford trans., p. 603).

7
. Descartes,
Principles of Philosophy
, trans. V. R. Miller and R. P. Miller, pp. 60, 114.

8
. On this point, see Peter Dear,
Revolutionizing the Sciences—European Knowledge and Its Ambitions, 1500–1700
, 2nd ed. (Princeton University Press, Princeton, N.J., and Oxford, 2009), Chapter 8.

9
. L. Laudan, “The Clock Metaphor and Probabilism: The Impact of Descartes on English Methodological Thought,”
Annals of Science
22
, 73 (1966). Contrary conclusions were reached in G. A. J.
Rogers, “Descartes and the Method of English Science,”
Annals of Science
29
, 237 (1972).

10
. Richard Watson,
Cogito Ergo Sum—The Life of René Descartes
(David R. Godine, Boston, Mass., 2002).

14. The Newtonian Synthesis

1
. This is described in D. T. Whiteside, ed., General Introduction to Volume 20,
The Mathematical Papers of Isaac Newton
(Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1968), pp. xi–xii.

2
. Ibid., Volume 2, footnote, pp. 206–7; and Volume 3, pp. 6–7.

3
. See, for example, Richard S. Westfall,
Never at Rest—A Biography of Isaac Newton
(Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1980), Chapter 14.

4
. Peter Galison,
How Experiments End
(University of Chicago Press, Chicago, Ill., 1987).

5
. Quoted in Westfall,
Never at Rest
, p. 143.

6
. Quoted in
Dictionary of Scientific Biography
, ed. Charles Coulston Gillespie (Scribner, New York, 1970), Volume 6, p. 485.

7
. Quoted in James Gleick,
Isaac Newton
(Pantheon, New York, 2003), p. 120.

8
. Quotations from I. Bernard Cohen and Anne Whitman, trans.,
Isaac Newton—The Principia
, 3rd ed. (University of California Press, Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1999). Before this version, the standard translation was
The Principia—Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy
(University of California Press, Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1962), trans. Florian Cajori (1792), rev. trans. Andrew Motte.

9
. G. E. Smith, “Newton’s Study of Fluid Mechanics,”
International Journal of Engineering Science
36
, 1377 (1998).

10
. Modern astronomical data in this chapter are from C. W. Allen,
Astrophysical Quantities
, 2nd ed. (Athlone, London, 1963).

11
. The standard work on the history of the measurement of the size of the solar system is Albert van Helden,
Measuring the Universe—Cosmic Dimensions from Aristarchus to Halley
(University of Chicago Press, Chicago, Ill., 1985).

12
. See Robert P. Crease,
World in the Balance—The Historic Quest for an Absolute System of Measurement
(W. W. Norton, New York, 2011).

13
. See J. Z. Buchwald and M. Feingold,
Newton and the Origin of Civilization
(Princeton University Press, Princeton, N.J., 2014).

14
. See S. Chandrasekhar,
Newton’s
Principia
for the Common Reader
(Clarendon, Oxford, 1995), pp. 472–76; Westfall,
Never at Rest
, pp. 736–39.

15
. R. S. Westfall, “Newton and the Fudge Factor,”
Science
179
, 751 (1973).

16
. See G. E. Smith, “How Newton’s
Principia
Changed Physics,” in
Interpreting Newton: Critical Essays
, ed. A. Janiak and E. Schliesser (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2012), pp. 360–95.

17
. Voltaire,
Philosophical
Letters, trans. E. Dilworth (Bobbs-Merrill Educational Publishing, Indianapolis, Ind., 1961), p. 61.

18
. The opposition to Newtonianism is described in articles by A. B. Hall, E. A. Fellmann, and P. Casini in “
Newton’s Principia
: A Discussion Organized and Edited by D. G. King-Hele and A. R. Hall,”
Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society
42
, 1 (1988).

19
. Christiaan Huygens,
Discours de la Cause de la Pesanteur
(1690), trans. Karen Bailey, with annotations by Karen Bailey and G. E. Smith, available from Smith at Tufts University (1997).

20
. Shapin has argued that this conflict even had political implications: Steven Shapin, “Of Gods and Kings: Natural Philosophy and Politics in the Leibniz-Clarke Disputes,”
Isis
72
, 187 (1981).

21
. S. Weinberg,
Gravitation and Cosmology
(Wiley, New York, 1972), Chapter 15.

22
. G. E. Smith, to be published.

23
. Quoted in
A Random Walk in Science
, ed. R. L. Weber and E. Mendoza (Taylor and Francis, London, 2000).

24
. Robert K. Merton, “Motive Forces of the New Science,”
Osiris
4
, Part 2 (1938); reprinted in
Science, Technology, and Society in Seventeenth-Century England
(Howard Fertig, New York, 1970), and in
On Social Structure and Science
, ed. Piotry Sztompka (University of Chicago Press, Chicago, Ill., 1996), pp. 223–40.

15. Epilogue: The Grand Reduction

1
. I have given a more detailed account of some of this progress in
The Discovery of Subatomic Particles
, rev. ed. (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2003).

2
. Isaac Newton,
Opticks, or A Treatise of the Reflections, Refractions, Inflections, and Colours of Light
(Dover, New York, 1952, based on 4th ed., London, 1730), p. 394.

3
. Ibid., p. 376.

4
. This is from Ostwald’s
Outlines of General Chemistry
, and is quoted by G. Holton, in
Historical Studies in the Physical Sciences
9
, 161 (1979), and I. B. Cohen, in
Critical Problems in the History of Science
, ed. M. Clagett (University of Wisconsin Press, Madison, 1959).

5
. P. A. M. Dirac, “Quantum Mechanics of Many-Electron Systems,”
Proceedings of the Royal Society
A123
, 713 (1929).

6
. To forestall accusations of plagiarism, I will acknowledge here that this last paragraph is a riff on the last paragraph of Darwin’s
On the Origin of Species.

Bibliography

This bibliography lists the modern secondary sources on the history of science on which I have relied, as well as original works of past scientists that I have consulted, from the fragments of the pre-Socratics to Newton’s
Principia
, and more sketchily on to the present. The works listed are all in English or English translations; unfortunately, I have no Latin and less Greek, let alone Arabic. This is not intended to be a list of the most authoritative sources, or of the best editions of each source. These are simply the books that I have consulted in writing
To Explain the World
, in the best editions that happened to be available to me.