Buy Practical Matter at Amazon

Practical Matter

by Margaret C. Jacob
Get an email alert when this author’s titles go on sale!
Follow this author
Larry Stewart
Get an email alert when this author’s titles go on sale!
Follow this author

Published by Harvard University Press

“A highly ambitious and provocative survey of the cultural history of science and industry” from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries (Journal of Modern History).

In 1687, the publication of Isaac Newton’s Principia Mathematica sparked a profound transformation in the world. From that event in the late-seventeenth century to the Crystal Palace Exhibition of 1851, science gradually moved to the center Western thought and economic development. In Practical Matter, Margaret Jacob and Larry Stewart chronicle this dramatic, epochal shift.

Despite powerful opposition on the Continent, a Newtonian understanding gained broad-based acceptance and practical application. By the mid-eighteenth century, the race was on to apply Newtonian mechanics to industry and manufacturing. The ascendancy of the new science culminated in the creating of the Crystal Palace Exhibition, London’s temple to scientific and technological progress.

With fascinating insight into the changing culture of industry and higher learning, Jacob and Stewart show that there was nothing inevitable about the Scientific Revolution. “It is easy to forget that science might have been stillborn, or remained the esoteric knowledge of court elites. Instead, for better and for worse, science became a centerpiece of Western culture.”

BUY NOW FROM

Join our community.
Great stories. Great deals. Weekly.


Good Reads

COMMUNITY REVIEWS