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23 results

Page 1 of 2

  • ‘Your astronomers and ours differ exceedingly’: the controversy over the ‘new star’ of 1572 in the light of a newly discovered text by Thomas Digges

  • STEPHEN PUMFREY
  • Journal:
    The British Journal for the History of Science / Volume 44 / Issue 1 / March 2011
    Published online by Cambridge University Press:
    08 October 2010, pp. 29-60
    Print publication:
    March 2011

  • This article presents evidence that an anonymous publication of 1573, a Letter sent by a gentleman of England [concerning …] the myraculous starre nowe shyning, was written by Thomas Digges, England's first Copernican. It tells the story of how it arose out of research commissioned by Elizabeth I's privy counsellors in response to the conventional argument of Jean Gosselin, librarian to Henri III of France, that the star was a comet which presaged wars. The text is significant because it seems to contain the observations and opinions that Digges held before he completed his other astronomical treatise, the groundbreaking Alae seu scalae mathematicae. It also casts some light on the development of Digges's radical and puritan views about the star, Copernican astronomy, the infinity of the universe and a belief that the ‘latter days’ of the world had arrived.

Science and Religion
  • New Historical Perspectives
  • Edited by Thomas Dixon, Geoffrey Cantor, Stephen Pumfrey
  • Published online:
    05 May 2010
    Print publication:
    01 April 2010
  • The idea of an inevitable conflict between science and religion was decisively challenged by John Hedley Brooke in his classic Science and Religion: Some Historical Perspectives (Cambridge, 1991). Almost two decades on, Science and Religion: New Historical Perspectives revisits this argument and asks how historians can now impose order on the complex and contingent histories of religious engagements with science. Bringing together leading scholars, this volume explores the history and changing meanings of the categories 'science' and 'religion'; the role of publishing and education in forging and spreading ideas; the connection between knowledge, power and intellectual imperialism; and the reasons for the confrontation between evolution and creationism among American Christians and in the Islamic world. A major contribution to the historiography of science and religion, this book makes the most recent scholarship on this much misunderstood debate widely accessible.

  • Preface

  • Edited by Thomas Dixon, Queen Mary University of London, Geoffrey Cantor, University of Leeds, Stephen Pumfrey
  • Book:
    Science and Religion
    Published online:
    05 May 2010
    Print publication:
    01 April 2010, pp xiii-xiv

  • Summary

    In July 2007 a conference was held at the University of Lancaster to mark the retirement of John Hedley Brooke. The original idea for the conference came from Stephen Pumfrey, who had started his career under John's mentorship at Lancaster. Thomas Dixon, who was at that time also at Lancaster, took the lead in organizing the event. Both the Lancaster organizers were extremely grateful for the advice and support of Geoffrey Cantor, who assisted with the planning of the original conference.

    The 2007 conference was attended by many of John Brooke's friends, colleagues, and students who were keen to acknowledge his substantial contributions to the historical study of science and religion, and particularly the influence he has had on a whole generation of scholars and students through his book Science and religion: Some historical perspectives, published in 1991, and his other publications, as well as through personal contact and encouragement. John taught in the History Department at the University of Lancaster from 1969 to 1999 and then moved to the Andreas Idreos Chair in Science and Religion at the University of Oxford until his retirement in 2006.

    Over a hundred and fifty people attended the Lancaster conference. Dozens of excellent papers were given on that occasion, which could together have provided material for several edited books offering a range of historical and contemporary perspectives.

  • 1 - William Gilbert

  • Edited by Peter Harman, Lancaster University, Simon Mitton
  • Book:
    Cambridge Scientific Minds
    Published online:
    05 June 2014
    Print publication:
    21 January 2002, pp 6-20

  • Summary

    As for the causes of magnetic movements, referred to in the schools of philosophers to the four elements and to prime qualities, these we leave for roaches and moths to prey upon.

    Gilbert, De Magnete, Book II, Chapter 3.

    The reputation of William Gilbert (1544–1603) as a great scientific mind traditionally rests on three foundations, all of which are evident in the only book he published, the seminal De Magnete [On the Loadstone] (London, 1600). First, he discovered that the Earth was a giant magnet and, in order to establish the fact, inaugurated the modern science of magnetism. Secondly, he rightly boasted that the method evident in De Magnete was experimental, a radical break with the more textual methods used by his scholastic contemporaries. Finally, he distinguished between magnetism and electricity, which had hitherto been paired as similar, occult attractive principles; he even coined the noun electricitas, which was rapidly Anglicised as ‘electricity’. Gilbert has been made a hero as ‘the first experimental scientist’, and he would come first, chronologically, in many surveys of scientific minds, not just of Cambridge minds. In Cambridge, he is immortalised in the name of Gilbert Road, a development built on land belonging to his college, St John's. As a Cambridge schoolboy, I entered my primary school every day from Gilbert Road, regrettably ignorant of the existence of the eponymous scientific hero.

    Nevertheless, Gilbert's inclusion in this collection is probably the most controversial.

  • ‘O tempera, O magnes!’: A sociological analysis of the discovery of secular magnetic variation in 1634

  • Stephen Pumfrey
  • Journal:
    The British Journal for the History of Science / Volume 22 / Issue 2 / July 1989
    Published online by Cambridge University Press:
    05 January 2009, pp. 181-214
    Print publication:
    July 1989

  • As sociologists learn more about how scientific knowledge is created, they give historians the opportunity to rework their accounts from a more contextual perspective. It is relatively easy to do so in areas with large theoretical, cosmological or overtly ideological components. It is more difficult, but equally necessary, to open up very empirical accomplishments, and recent sociological analysis of the process of science gives us some interesting insights. This paper employs some of these on the apparently unpromising subject of the ‘discovery of secular magnetic variation’ in 1634 by the Gresham professor Henry Gellibrand.

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