The Lord Of Uraniborg

The Lord of Uraniborg is a comprehensive biography of Tycho Brahe, father of modern astronomy, famed alchemist and littérateur of the sixteenth-century Danish Renaissance. Written in a lively and engaging style, Victor Thoren's biography offers interesting perspectives on Tycho's life and presents alternative analyses of virtually every aspect of his scientific work. A range of readers interested in astronomy, history of astronomy and the history of science will find this book fascinating.

The great Paracelsian scholar Walter Pagel and the pioneer medical historian Kurt Polycarp Sprengel identified Petrus Severinus' Idea Medicinæ (1571) as an influential vehicle for the elaboration and diffusion of Paracelsian ideas in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, a process that has recently come under renewed scrutiny. Severinus' conception that diseases grow from living, seed-like entities proved to be an especially important idea, which was recognized by prominent scientific and medical authors from Oswald Croll and Daniel Sennert to Pierre Gassendi and Robert Boyle. But they also formed a useful theoretical model for reconciling ideas about physical causation with certain Christian Platonist concerns in Protestant theology. A Philosophical Path for Paracelsian Medicine is the first book-length monograph to treat Severinus, a Danish royal physician and contemporary of the great astronomer Tycho Brahe, and to present his ideas in their historical context as well as considering their ramifications for medical and religious theory in the decades prior to the Thirty Years' War. This book will prove to be a useful tool in the reexamination of the process by which Paracelsian ideas were spread and assimilated and will appeal to all those interested the intellectual background for the work of Tycho Brahe and his students and the role of Paracelsian and Hermetic metaphysical ideas in the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century.

This book explores Brahe's wide range of activities which encompass much more than his reputed role of astronomer. Christianson broadens this singular perspective by portraying Brahe as Platonic philosopher, Paracelsian chemist, Ovidian poet, and devoted family man. This pioneering study includes capsule biographies of two dozen men and women, including Johannes Kepler, Willebrord Snel, Willem Blaeu, several bishops and numerous technical specialists all of whom helped shape the culture of the Scientific Revolution. Under Tycho Brahe's leadership, their teamwork achieved breakthroughs in astronomy, scientific method, and research organization that were essential to the birth of modern science.

Science, Reading, and Renaissance Literature brings together key works in early modern science and imaginative literature (from the anatomy of William Harvey and the experimentalism of William Gilbert to the fictions of Philip Sidney, Edmund Spenser and Margaret Cavendish). The book documents how what have become our two cultures of belief define themselves through a shared aesthetics that understands knowledge as an act of making. Within this framework, literary texts gain substance and intelligibility by being considered as instances of early modern knowledge production. At the same time, early modern science maintains strong affiliations with poetry because it understands art as a basis for producing knowledge. In identifying these interconnections between literature and science, this book contributes to scholarship in literary history, history of reading and the book, science studies and the history of academic disciplines.

We all know the history of science that we learned from grade school textbooks: How Galileo used his telescope to show that the earth was not the center of the universe; how Newton divined gravity from the falling apple; how Einstein unlocked the mysteries of time and space with a simple equation. This history is made up of long periods of ignorance and confusion, punctuated once an age by a brilliant thinker who puts it all together. These few tower over the ordinary mass of people, and in the traditional account, it is to them that we owe science in its entirety. This belief is wrong. A People's History of Science shows how ordinary people participate in creating science and have done so throughout history. It documents how the development of science has affected ordinary people, and how ordinary people perceived that development. It would be wrong to claim that the formulation of quantum theory or the structure of DNA can be credited directly to artisans or peasants, but if modern science is likened to a skyscraper, then those twentieth-century triumphs are the sophisticated filigrees at its pinnacle that are supported by the massive foundation created by the rest of us.

The Danish aristocrat and astronomer Tycho Brahe personified the inventive vitality of Renaissance life in the sixteenth century. Brahe lost his nose in a student duel, wrote Latin poetry, and built one of the most astonishing villas of the late Renaissance, while virtually inventing team research and establishing the fundamental rules of empirical science. His observatory at Uraniborg functioned as a satellite to Hamlet’s castle of Kronborg until Tycho abandoned it to end his days at the court of the Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II in Prague. This illustrated biography presents a new and dynamic view of Tycho’s life, reassessing his gradual separation of astrology from astronomy and his key relationships with Johannes Kepler, his sister Sophie, and his kinsmen at the court of King Frederick II.

An innovative integrated approach to classical physics and the beginnings of quantum physics through a sequence of historical case studies.

For more than 30 years, historians have rejected what they call the ‘warfare thesis’ – the idea that there is an inevitable conflict between religion and science – insisting that scientists and believers can live in harmony. This book disagrees. Taking as its starting point the most famous of all such conflicts, the Galileo affair, it argues that religious and scientific communities exhibit very different attitudes to knowledge. Scripturally based religions not only claim a source of knowledge distinct from human reason. They are also bound by tradition, insist upon the certainty of their beliefs, and are resistant to radical criticism in ways in which the sciences are not. If traditionally minded believers perceive a clash between what their faith tells them and the findings of modern science, they may well do what the Church authorities did in Galileo’s time. They may attempt to close down the science, insisting that the authority of God’s word trumps that of any ‘merely human’ knowledge. Those of us who value science must take care to ensure this does not happen.