Download or read book The Transmutations of Chymistry written by Lawrence M. Principe and published by Synthesis. This book was released on 2020 with total page 481 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A merchant of the marvelous -- A Batavian in Paris -- Essaying chymistry -- A new chymical light -- Chrysopoeia at the AcadeÌ1mie and the Palais Royal -- Chymistry in Homberg's later years : practices, promises, poisons, and prisons -- Homberg's legacy -- Epilogue: Homberg and the transmutations of chymistry at the AcadeÌ1mie.
Download or read book The Transmutations of Chymistry written by Lawrence M. DeMartino and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2020-10-09 with total page 481 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book reevaluates the changes to chymistry that took place from 1660 to 1730 through a close study of the chymist Wilhelm Homberg (1653–1715) and the changing fortunes of his discipline at the Académie Royale des Sciences, France’s official scientific body. By charting Homberg’s remarkable life from Java to France’s royal court, and his endeavor to create a comprehensive theory of chymistry (including alchemical transmutation), Lawrence M. Principe reveals the period’s significance and reassesses its place in the broader sweep of the history of science. Principe, the leading authority on the subject, recounts how Homberg’s radical vision promoted chymistry as the most powerful and reliable means of understanding the natural world. Homberg’s work at the Académie and in collaboration with the future regent, Philippe II d’Orléans, as revealed by a wealth of newly uncovered documents, provides surprising new insights into the broader changes chymistry underwent during, and immediately after, Homberg. A human, disciplinary, and institutional biography, The Transmutations of Chymistry significantly revises what was previously known about the contours of chymistry and scientific institutions in the early eighteenth century.
Download or read book Transmutations alchemy in Art written by Lawrence Principe and published by Chemical Heritage Foundation. This book was released on 2002 with total page 52 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Alchemy is one of the most evocative subjects in the history of science. Alchemy made important contributions to the development of modern science while firing popular imagination so strongly that portrayals of the alchemist at work pervaded the arts. The more celebrated goals of alchemy, like transmutation of base metals into gold, still tease and tantalize. Transmutations offers a thoughtful look at the role of the alchemist in the 17th and 18th centuries, as depicted in a selection of paintings from the Eddleman and Fisher Collections housed at the Chemical Heritage Foundation. This beautiful full-color book reveals much about the beginnings of chemistry as a profession.
Download or read book The Experimental Fire written by Jennifer M. Rampling and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2020-12-11 with total page 427 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A 400-year history of the development of alchemy in England that brings to light the evolution of the practice. In medieval and early modern Europe, the practice of alchemy promised extraordinary physical transformations. Who would not be amazed to see base metals turned into silver and gold, hard iron into soft water, and deadly poison into elixirs that could heal the human body? To defend such claims, alchemists turned to the past, scouring ancient books for evidence of a lost alchemical heritage and seeking to translate their secret language and obscure imagery into replicable, practical effects. Tracing the development of alchemy in England over four hundred years, from the beginning of the fourteenth century to the end of the seventeenth, Jennifer M. Rampling illuminates the role of alchemical reading and experimental practice in the broader context of national and scientific history. Using new manuscript sources, she shows how practitioners like George Ripley, John Dee, and Edward Kelley, as well as many previously unknown alchemists, devised new practical approaches to alchemy while seeking the support of English monarchs. By reconstructing their alchemical ideas, practices, and disputes, Rampling reveals how English alchemy was continually reinvented over the space of four centuries, resulting in changes to the science itself. In so doing, The Experimental Fire bridges the intellectual history of chemistry and the wider worlds of early modern patronage, medicine, and science.
Download or read book The Life and Science of Harold C Urey written by Matthew Shindell and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2019-12-03 with total page 266 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Harold C. Urey (1893–1981), whose discoveries lie at the foundation of modern science, was one of the most famous American scientists of the twentieth century. Born in rural Indiana, his evolution from small-town farm boy to scientific celebrity made him a symbol and spokesman for American scientific authority. Because he rose to fame alongside the prestige of American science, the story of his life reflects broader changes in the social and intellectual landscape of twentieth-century America. In this, the first ever biography of the chemist, Matthew Shindell shines new light on Urey’s struggles and achievements in a thoughtful exploration of the science, politics, and society of the Cold War era. From Urey’s orthodox religious upbringing to his death in 1981, Shindell follows the scientist through nearly a century of American history: his discovery of deuterium and heavy water earned him the Nobel Prize in 1934, his work on the Manhattan Project helped usher in the atomic age, he initiated a generation of American scientists into the world of quantum physics and chemistry, and he took on the origin of the Moon in NASA’s lunar exploration program. Despite his success, however, Urey had difficulty navigating the nuclear age. In later years he lived in the shadow of the bomb he helped create, plagued by the uncertainties unleashed by the rise of American science and unable to reconcile the consequences of scientific progress with the morality of religion. Tracing Urey’s life through two world wars and the Cold War not only conveys the complex historical relationship between science and religion in the twentieth century, but it also illustrates how these complexities spilled over into the early days of space science. More than a life story, this book immerses readers in the trials and triumphs of an extraordinary man and his extraordinary times.
Download or read book The Experimental Self written by Jan Golinski and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2016-05-11 with total page 268 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What did it mean to be a scientist before the profession itself existed? Jan Golinski finds an answer in the remarkable career of Humphry Davy, the foremost chemist of his day and one of the most distinguished British men of science of the nineteenth century. Originally a country boy from a modest background, Davy was propelled by his scientific accomplishments to a knighthood and the presidency of the Royal Society. An enigmatic figure to his contemporaries, Davy has continued to elude the efforts of biographers to classify him: poet, friend to Coleridge and Wordsworth, author of travel narratives and a book on fishing, chemist and inventor of the miners’ safety lamp. What are we to make of such a man? In The Experimental Self, Golinski argues that Davy’s life is best understood as a prolonged process of self-experimentation. He follows Davy from his youthful enthusiasm for physiological experiment through his self-fashioning as a man of science in a period when the path to a scientific career was not as well-trodden as it is today. What emerges is a portrait of Davy as a creative fashioner of his own identity through a lifelong series of experiments in selfhood.
Download or read book The Elements written by Philip Ball and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2021-09-27 with total page 225 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From water, air, and fire to tennessine and oganesson, celebrated science writer Philip Ball leads us through the full sweep of the field of chemistry in this exquisitely illustrated history of the elements. The Elements is a stunning visual journey through the discovery of the chemical building blocks of our universe. By piecing together the history of the periodic table, Ball explores not only how we have come to understand what everything is made of, but also how chemistry developed into a modern science. Ball groups the elements into chronological eras of discovery, covering seven millennia from the first known to the last named. As he moves from prehistory and classical antiquity to the age of atomic bombs and particle accelerators, Ball highlights images and stories from around the world and sheds needed light on those who struggled for their ideas to gain inclusion. By also featuring some elements that aren’t true elements but were long thought to be—from the foundational prote hyle and heavenly aetherof the ancient Greeks to more recent false elements like phlogiston and caloric—The Elements boldly tells the full history of the central science of chemistry.
Download or read book Making Marie Curie written by Eva Hemmungs Wirtén and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2015-03-17 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This unconventional biography of Marie Curie explores the emergence of the "Curie persona," the information culture of the period that shaped its development, and the strategies Curie herself used to manage and exploit her intellectual property.--Adapted from publisher description.
Download or read book Alchemy Tried in the Fire written by William R. Newman and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2005-06 with total page 362 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: William Newman and Lawrence Principe reveal the hitherto hidden laboratory experiments of a famous alchemist and argue that many of the principles and practices characteristic of modern chemistry derive from alchemy.
Download or read book The Chemical Wedding of Christian Rosenkreutz written by Joscelyn Godwin and published by Red Wheel/Weiser. This book was released on 1991-10-01 with total page 180 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Chemical Wedding of Christian Rosenkreutz, often looked upon as the third Rosicrucian manifesto, has an entirely different tone from the other Rosicrucian documents. Unlike the Rosicrucian manifestoes, which address the transformation of society, The Chemical Wedding is concerned with the inner transformation of the soul. It is a deeply interior work, one which asks the reader to step into its world of symbols and walk with Christian Rosenkreutz along his path of transformation. Despite its importance as a key text of the Western esoteric traditions, this is the first ever contemporary English translation of The Chemical Wedding, made especially for this edition by Joscelyn Godwin. Also included in this edition is an introduction and commentary by Adam McLean, which illuminates the transformative symbolism.
Download or read book The Story of Alchemy and the Beginnings of Chemistry written by Matthew Moncrieff Pattison Muir and published by Mundus Publishing. This book was released on 1902 with total page 196 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Alchemists written by F. Sherwood Taylor and published by . This book was released on 2013-10 with total page 270 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is a new release of the original 1949 edition.
Download or read book Promethean Ambitions written by William R. Newman and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2004 with total page 351 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In an age when the nature of reality is complicated daily by advances in bioengineering, cloning, and artificial intelligence, it is easy to forget that the ever-evolving boundary between nature and technology has long been a source of ethical and scientific concern: modern anxieties about the possibility of artificial life and the dangers of tinkering with nature more generally were shared by opponents of alchemy long before genetic science delivered us a cloned sheep named Dolly. In Promethean Ambitions, William R. Newman ambitiously uses alchemy to investigate the thinning boundary between the natural and the artificial. Focusing primarily on the period between 1200 and 1700, Newman examines the labors of pioneering alchemists and the impassioned—and often negative—responses to their efforts. By the thirteenth century, Newman argues, alchemy had become a benchmark for determining the abilities of both men and demons, representing the epitome of creative power in the natural world. Newman frames the art-nature debate by contrasting the supposed transmutational power of alchemy with the merely representational abilities of the pictorial and plastic arts—a dispute which found artists such as Leonardo da Vinci and Bernard Palissy attacking alchemy as an irreligious fraud. The later assertion by the Paracelsian school that one could make an artificial human being—the homunculus—led to further disparagement of alchemy, but as Newman shows, the immense power over nature promised by the field contributed directly to the technological apologetics of Francis Bacon and his followers. By the mid-seventeenth century, the famous "father of modern chemistry," Robert Boyle, was employing the arguments of medieval alchemists to support the identity of naturally occurring substances with those manufactured by "chymical" means. In using history to highlight the art-nature debate, Newman here shows that alchemy was not an unformed and capricious precursor to chemistry; it was an art founded on coherent philosophical and empirical principles, with vocal supporters and even louder critics, that attracted individuals of first-rate intellect. The historical relationship that Newman charts between human creation and nature has innumerable implications today, and he ably links contemporary issues to alchemical debates on the natural versus the artificial.
Download or read book What Painting is written by James Elkins and published by Psychology Press. This book was released on 1999 with total page 284 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Here, Elkins argues that alchemists and painters have similar relationships to the substances they work with. Both try to transform the substance, while seeking to transform their own experience.
Download or read book New Narratives in Eighteenth Century Chemistry written by Lawrence M. Principe and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2007-09-14 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The eighteenth century has long been considered critical for the development of modern chemistry, yet many features of the period remain largely unknown or unexplored. This volume details new approaches and topics to build a more complex view of chemical work during the period. Themes include late-phase alchemy, professionalization, chemical education, and the links and relations between chemistry and pharmacy, medicine, agriculture, and geology.
Download or read book Pure Intelligence written by Melvyn C. Usselman and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2015-05-21 with total page 430 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: William Hyde Wollaston was born into a large, religious, and scientifically informed family in 1766 and died sixty-two years later as one of the Western world s most highly regarded scientists. With encouragement from his well-connected father, he studied medicine at Cambridge, and began practicing as a physician in the provinces before moving his practice to London in 1797, arriving in the capital about the same time as his illustrious colleagues Humphry Davy and Thomas Young. After a few years in London, Wollaston abandoned the vocation he had come to dislike and bravely set out to make his living as a chemical entrepreneur, while pursuing his intellectual interests in a wide range of contemporary scientific subjects. He, Davy, and Young were to become Britain s leading scientific practitioners in the first third of the nineteenth century, and their deaths within a six month time span were seen by many as the end of a glorious period of British supremacy in science. In contrast to his two more famous colleagues, Wollaston s life was not recorded for posterity in a contemporary biography, and his many remarkable scientific, commercial, instrumental, and institutional achievements have fallen into obscurity as a result. This biography is the first book-length study of Wollaston, his science, and the environment in which he thrived."
Download or read book Osiris Volume 29 written by Matthew D. Eddy and published by University of Chicago Press Journals. This book was released on 2015-03-11 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The last twenty-five years have witnessed some provocative transmutations in our understanding of early modern chemistry. The alchemist, once marginalized as a quack, now joins the apothecary, miner, humanist, and natural historian as a practitioner of “chymistry.” In a similar vein, the Chemical Revolution of the eighteenth century, with its focus on phlogiston and airs, has been expanded to include artisanal, medical, and industrial practices. This collection of essays builds on these reappraisals and excavates the affinities between alchemy, chymistry, and chemistry from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries. It reveals a rich world of theory and practice in which instruments, institutions, inscriptions and ideas were used to make material knowledge. More generally, the volume will catalyze wide-ranging discussions of material and visual cultures, the role of expertise, and the religious and practical contexts of scientific inquiry.
