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Old 03-02-2011, 02:15 PM   #154
FlorenceArt
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Join Date: Jul 2008
Location: Montreuil sous bois, France
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As promised, here is an account of my (not very deep, I'm afraid) explorations into the history of science.

I think I first got interested in this subject a few years ago, when I read at about the same time two excellent, and very different, works of fiction: An Instance of the Fingerpost by Iain Pears, and The Island of the Day Before by Umberto Eco. In both books, I got a glimpse of a pre-modern or maybe proto-modern thinking struggling to make sense of the world. And I started wondering: when did we become modern, how, and why?

Bruno Latour's answer is that We Have Never Been Modern. I was drawn to the catchy title (being French, and a child of the 60s, I tend to have a positive bias toward iconoclast standpoints) but rather disappointed by the book. I have to believe Latour knows what he is talking about, but apparently his idea of popular science is to repeat an idea several times (in a very lively and witty manner) without ever bothering to prove it. Or at least not in a way that I could understand and adhere to.

On the other hand, Latour also wrote Laboratory Life, an account of his studies of scientists in their natural habitat, which I hope is more rewarding, but haven't read yet.

Feeling more and more intrigued but frustrated by Latour's book, I moved on to a book that Latour cites many times, Leviathan and the Air-Pump by Stephen Shapin. That's more like it: an exploration of the links between the social and political world and the development of science, through a case study of Boyle's experiments with his air-pump and his political and scientific disagreements with Thomas Hobbes, in the context of an England recovering from years of civil war. A fascinating period, by the way, which is also described in Neal Stephenson's Baroque Cycle.

That's as far as I went on this subject for a while, and maybe it's enough for one post. More later, probably.
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