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The Romance of Science pays tribute to the wide-ranging and highly influential work of Trevor Levere, historian of science and author of Poetry Realised in Nature, Transforming Matter, Science and the Canadian Arctic, Affinity and Matter and other significant inquiries in the history of modern science. Expanding on Levere's many themes and interests, The Romance of Science assembles historians of science -- all influenced by Levere's work -- to explore such matters as the place and space of instruments in science, the role and meaning of science museums, poetry in nature, chemical warfare and warfare in nature, science in Canada and the Arctic, Romanticism, aesthetics and morals in natural philosophy, and the "dismal science" of economics. The Romance of Science explores the interactions between science's romantic, material, institutional and economic engagements with Nature.
List of contents
1. Ernie Hamm: Trevor Levere, Affinities that Matter.- 2. Victor Boantza: Elements, Instruments, and Menstruums: Boerhaave's Imponderable Fire Between Chemical Masterpiece and Physical Axiom.- 3. Larry Stewart, At the Medical Edge or, THE BEDDOES EFFECT.- 4. David Philip Miller, 'Men of Letters' and 'Men of Press Copies': The Cultures of James Watt's Copying Machine.- 5. David Knight, Poetry, Chemistry, and Wisdom.- 6. Robert Anderson, Facts or Fantasies in the Chemistry Lecture Theatre?.- 7. Janis Langins, Poetry In War And War In Nature. From Vauban To Naturphilosophie To Clausewitz.- 8. Greg Good, John Herschel's Geology: The Cape of Good Hope in the 1830s.- 9. Margaret Schabas, More Food for Thought: Mill, Coleridge and the Dismal Science of Economics.- 10. Gordon McOuat, "These can not all have an interest for England": Chance Events, Beauty and The Trouble with Romanticism in Britain.- 11. Andrew Ede, Science Born of Poison, Fire and Smoke: Chemical Warfare and the Origins of Big Science.- 12. Jed Buchwald, Politics, Morality, Innovation, and Misrepresentation in Physical Science and Technology.- 13. Jennifer Hubbard, Fishing an Extreme Environment: Science, Sovereignty and Hudson Bay.- 14. David Pantalony, Collectors, Displays and Replicas in Context: What We Learn from Provenance Research in Science Museums.- 15. Suzanne Zeller, Context, Connections and Culture: The History of Science in Canada as a Field of Study.
About the author
Jed Buchwald is Doris and Henry Dreyfuss Professor of History at Caltech and is finishing a book on the decipherment of Egyptian hieroglyphs. His most recent publications are The Zodiac of Paris (Princeton, 2010, co-author Diane Greco Josefowicz), Isaac Newton and the Origin of Civilization (Princeton, 2012, co-author Mordechai Feingold), and “Kirchhoff’s theory for optical diffraction” (Archive for History of Exact Sciences, 70 (2016):464-511, co-author Chen-Pang Yeang).
Larry Stewart is Professor of History at the University of Saskatchewan and is currently writing a study of experiment during the late Enlightenment and first industrial revolution. His most recent work, edited with Erika Dyck, is
The Uses of Humans in Experiment. Perspectives from the 17th to the 20th Century (Brill/Rodopi, 2016).
Summary
The Romance of Science pays tribute to the wide-ranging and highly influential work of Trevor Levere, historian of science and author of Poetry Realised in Nature, Transforming Matter, Science and the Canadian Arctic, Affinity and Matter and other significant inquiries in the history of modern science. Expanding on Levere’s many themes and interests, The Romance of Science assembles historians of science -- all influenced by Levere's work -- to explore such matters as the place and space of instruments in science, the role and meaning of science museums, poetry in nature, chemical warfare and warfare in nature, science in Canada and the Arctic, Romanticism, aesthetics and morals in natural philosophy, and the “dismal science” of economics. The Romance of Science explores the interactions between science's romantic, material, institutional and economic engagements with Nature.
