By Margaret C. Jacob, Larry Stewart
Margaret Jacob and Larry Stewart research the profound transformation that started in 1687. From the yr whilst Newton released his Principia to the Crystal Palace Exhibition of 1851, technology steadily turned valuable to Western inspiration and financial improvement. The e-book goals at a basic viewers and examines how, regardless of strong competition at the Continent, a Newtonian realizing received reputation and useful software. by means of the mid-eighteenth century the hot technology had completed ascendancy, and the race used to be directly to follow Newtonian mechanics to and production. They finish the tale with the temple to clinical and technological development that used to be the Crystal Palace exhibition. selecting their examples rigorously, Jacob and Stewart express that there has been not anything preordained or inevitable concerning the centrality presented to technological know-how. "It is straightforward to omit that technological know-how could have been stillborn, or remained the esoteric wisdom of court docket elites. in its place, for higher and for worse, technology grew to become a centerpiece of Western culture."
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Additional info for Practical Matter: Newton's Science in the Service of Industry and Empire, 1687-1851 (New Histories of Science, Technology, and Medicine)
Example text
A generation later, Clarke’s exact contemporary and close friend of Newton, William Whiston, made his reputation on speculations about the early state of the earth and the intercession of comets in his New Theory of 1696. 23 But early in his career, Whiston was simply attempting to assert that physical evidence sustained the Christian account of creation. Hence, when he took employment in the Whig Richard Steele’s “Censorium” in London, part of his mission as a public lecturer was to challenge those sectarians who believed that they had personal access to the true meaning of scriptural prophecy, a sentiment labelled “enthusiasm” and one that befuddled British politics before and during the civil wars.
As the paradigm shifted away from Aristotle, and finally away from Descartes, resting then on Newtonian science, the French followed the British and the Dutch as exponents of universal gravitation and everything that it implied. The French Newtonians Interestingly enough, by the 1730s only Newton’s law of universal gravitation remained among the laws for which no physical or experimental demonstration had yet been provided. Aside from his brilliant mathematics, Newton relied on analogies to local motion, weights, pendula, and so on.
People had to believe that only a divine will could have established the laws of celestial mechanics as Newton had discovered them. In his lectures Clarke banished doctrines that asserted the independence of the material by noting that “if there be a vacuum as Newton maintained, it follows plainly that matter is not a necessary being . . If an atheist will yet assert that matter may be necessary, though not necessary to be 20 • PRACTICAL MATTER everywhere, I answer this is an express contradiction.