A People's History of Science by Clifford Conner

A People's History of Science by Clifford Conner

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 centre 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.

Clifford D. Conner teaches at John Jay School of Criminal Law in New York. His previous writings on the era of the French Revolution include a biography of Jean-Paul Marat.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9781560257486
ISBN 10	1560257482
Title	A People's History of Science
Author	Clifford Conner
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Paperback
Publisher	Avalon Publishing Group
Year published	2005-11-08
Number of pages	568
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.