WWW
Sources for the Origins of Modern Science
History of Science in general
Early Modern Science in particular
Week 1
The Scientific Revolution in Fiction
Week 2
For the history of astronomy up to and including the early modern
period, see
Images of the manuscript
original of Copernicus' De revolutionibus, how held by his
alma
mater, Jagiellonian University in Cracow.
The link to an online version of the reading in De revolutionibus
is part of a site at Dartmouth titled "As
the World Turned: A Reader on the Progress of the Heliocentric
System
from Copernicus to Galileo".
Visit the National Library of Medicine's online exhibit,
Dream
Anatomy, in particular the page on "Technologies
of Anatomical Representation".
Week 3
Wolfgang
Lefèvre and Marcus Popplow,
together
with coworkers at the Max
Planck Institute for History of Science, have assembled a multilinked,
cross-referenced database of illustrations from the Renaissance machine
literature discussed in lecture; start browsing here.
Galileo has captured the attention and imagination of people at three
sites
in particular:
- The Gaileo
Project at Rice University
- The Istituto e Museo di Storia delle Scienze in Florence, which
focuses on Galileo and his era, has a rich
multimedia catalogue of its holding, with text, pictures, and
animations. Take some time to browse through it.
- The Max Planck Institute for History of Science in Berlin has
collaborated with the Institute in Florence on an online edition of
Galileo's early manuscript "On
motion". It is worth a visit just to see what the web makes
possible.
- Here is a "working copy" of the Crew-DeSalvio translation of Two
New Sciences at the University of Virginia
Another Berlin-Florence collaboration is an online edition of the archives
of the Opera del Duomo (Cathedral Works) in Florence during the
years
that Brunelleschi was building the dome.
Week 4
The Galileo Project at Rice has informative, illustrated pages on Tycho
Brahe and
Johannes Kepler. See also
The
Astronomical Instruments of Tycho Brahe at the Danish Royal
Library.
Listen to the
music of Kepler's Harmony of the World (1619).
The Law School at the University of Missouri, Kansas City, has
assembled
an online collection of materials related to the Trial
of Galileo. Among the materials is an abridged version of the Drake
translation
of the Dialogue
Concerning the Two Chief World Systems. Unfortunately, the
omitted
sections are precisely those in this week's readings.
Week 5
The
Corpus Hermeticum online
All you wanted to know about alchemy, and probably more, at The
Alchemy Website.
An online edition of the Aberdeen
Bestiary
Here is a full-color reproduction of the
elephant water clock of al-Jazari pictured in Figure 1 of Eamon's
article.
Eamon refers to Roger Bacon's Letter
on the Secret Works of Nature and of Art. Here is an online
translation of a portion of that work.
The illustrations for several of the works discussed by Eamon can be
found at the Database Machine Drawings at the Max Planck Institute
cited above: Conrad Kyeser's Bellifortis, Giovanni da
Fontana's Bellicorum
instrumentorum liber, and Agostino Ramelli's Le
diverse et artificiose machine.
Week 6
Week 7
Week 8
Week 9
Robert Boyle has his own website,
maintained
by Michael Hunter at Birkbeck College.
Robert
Hooke's page
A richly illustrated site on Dutch microscopist Antonie
van Leeuwenhoek
The Museum of the History of Science in Florence has prepared a digital
edition of the Italian original of the Essayes.
See also the special online exhibit, Horror
Vacui? The discovery of the
weight of air, and the existence of the vacuum: A tribute to
Evangelista Torricelli
Week 10
For a closer look at 17th-century mathematics and mechanics in general,
and Huygens in particular, see the online articles on my web
site.
Week 11
Week 12
For more on Zheng He (or Cheng Ho) and his voyages, start with the
article
on him in Wikipedia.