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Books > Professional & Technical > Technology: general issues > History of engineering & technology
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Curiosity (Paperback)
Loot Price: R388
Discovery Miles 3 880
You Save: R71
(15%)
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Curiosity (Paperback)
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List price R459
Loot Price R388
Discovery Miles 3 880
You Save R71 (15%)
Supplier out of stock. If you add this item to your wish list we will let you know when it becomes available.
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With the recent landing of the Mars rover Curiosity, it seems safe
to assume that the idea of being curious is alive and well in
modern science--that it's not merely encouraged but is seen as an
essential component of the scientific mission. Yet there was a time
when curiosity was condemned. Neither Pandora nor Eve could resist
the dangerous allure of unanswered questions, and all knowledge
wasn't equal--for millennia it was believed that there were some
things we should not try to know. In the late sixteenth century
this attitude began to change dramatically, and in "Curiosity:
""How Science Became Interested in Everything, "Philip Ball
investigates how curiosity first became sanctioned--when it changed
from a vice to a virtue and how it became permissible to ask any
and every question about the world. Looking closely at the
sixteenth through eighteenth centuries, Ball vividly brings to life
the age when modern science began, a time that spans the lives of
Galileo and Isaac Newton. In this entertaining and illuminating
account of the rise of science as we know it, Ball tells of
scientists both legendary and lesser known, from Copernicus and
Kepler to Robert Boyle, as well as the inventions and technologies
that were inspired by curiosity itself, such as the telescope and
the microscope. The so-called Scientific Revolution is often told
as a story of great geniuses illuminating the world with flashes of
inspiration. But "Curiosity" reveals a more complex story, in which
the liberation--and subsequent taming--of curiosity was linked to
magic, religion, literature, travel, trade, and empire. Ball also
asks what has become of curiosity today: how it functions in
science, how it is spun and packaged for consumption, how well it
is being sustained, and how the changing shape of science
influences the kinds of questions it may continue to ask. Though
proverbial wisdom tell us that it was through curiosity that our
innocence was lost, that has not deterred us. Instead, it has been
completely the contrary: today we spend vast sums trying to
reconstruct the first instants of creation in particle
accelerators, out of a pure desire to "know." Ball refuses to let
us take this desire for granted, and this book is a perfect homage
to such an inquisitive attitude.
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