|9780822944607|Metaphysics and Mining in Colonial Peru|The Matter of Empire examines the philosophical principles invoked by apologists of the Spanish empire that laid the foundations for the material exploitation of the Andean region between 1520 and 1640. Centered on Potosi, Bolivia, Orlando Bentancor’s original study ties the colonizers’ attempts to justify the abuses wrought upon the environment and the indigenous population to their larger ideology concerning mining, science, and the empire’s rightful place in the global sphere. Bentancor points to the underlying principles of Scholasticism, particularly in the work off Thomas Aquinas, as the basis of the instrumentalist conception of matter…

|9780822944744|Phytotrons and the Quest for Climate Control in the Cold War| Promising an end to global hunger and political instability, huge climate-controlled laboratories known as phytotrons spread around the world to thirty countries after the Second World War. The United States built nearly a dozen, including the first at Caltech in 1949. Made possible by computers and other novel greenhouse technologies of the early Cold War, phytotrons enabled plant scientists to experiment on the environmental causes of growth and development of living organisms. Subsequently, they turned biologists into technologists who, in their pursuit of knowledge about plants, also set out…

|9780822944751|Cultures of Display in Nineteenth-Century Britain and America| The nineteenth century witnessed a dramatic shift in the display and dissemination of natural knowledge across Britain and America, from private collections of miscellaneous artifacts and objects to public exhibitions and state-sponsored museums. The science museum as we know it—an institution of expert knowledge built to inform a lay public—was still very much in formation during this dynamic period. Science Museums in Transition provides a nuanced, comparative study of the diverse places and spaces in which science was displayed at a time when science and spectacle were still deeply intertwined; when leading…

|9780822945093|The Correspondence, January 1850–December 1852|As this volume begins, John Tyndall was a PhD student living in Marburg. He was unknown, almost broke, and working himself to the brink of mental and physical exhaustion in his determination to forge a reputation in science. In the period covered by this volume, he completed his degree, published his first scientific papers, became a regular participant in the British Association meetings, established friendships with leading men of science in Berlin and London, was elected Fellow of the Royal Society, and applied for, but failed to obtain, various scientific positions. As the volume ends, he…

|9780822965312| How did the brewing of beer become a scientific process? Sumner explores this question by charting the theory and practice of the trade in Britain and Ireland during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. From an oral culture derived from home-based skills, brewing industrialized rapidly and developed an extensive trade literature, based increasingly on the authority of chemical experiment. The role of taxation is also examined, and the emergence of brewing as a profession is set within its social and technical context. | James Sumner| Science and Culture in the Nineteenth Century| Science / History