Our scientific culture. The ancient world as a legacy.
Beautiful Letters| N° d'inventaire | 22372 |
| Format | 12.5 x 19 |
| Détails | 200 p., paperback with flaps. |
| Publication | Paris, 2020 |
| Etat | Nine |
| ISBN | 9782251450575 |
"Modern science had to free itself from its ancient heritage in order to take off. Mathematics deals with abstract entities, unrelated to the world around us, while physics manipulates real objects. In this era of technological boom, science is at the forefront, and the level of general scientific knowledge has never been higher." These are all preconceived ideas that mathematician and historian of science Lucio Russo brilliantly debunks in this short and incisive essay. With supporting texts, the author shows how important the debt of modern science to Antiquity is. He recalls the essential role of observable phenomena in the genesis of scientific theories, an aspect dangerously obscured by the complex abstraction processes of modern science and by the evolution of school curricula. He emphasizes that even the most contemporary science involves a method that, in this case, is directly inherited from the work of Euclid and his Hellenistic successors. A synthesis of a lifetime of research, Our Scientific Culture brings together different fields of knowledge (cosmology, chemistry, mathematics, tidal theory, etc.) and invites us to understand our scientific past in depth, the only way to free ourselves from it in order to build our future.
"Modern science had to free itself from its ancient heritage in order to take off. Mathematics deals with abstract entities, unrelated to the world around us, while physics manipulates real objects. In this era of technological boom, science is at the forefront, and the level of general scientific knowledge has never been higher." These are all preconceived ideas that mathematician and historian of science Lucio Russo brilliantly debunks in this short and incisive essay. With supporting texts, the author shows how important the debt of modern science to Antiquity is. He recalls the essential role of observable phenomena in the genesis of scientific theories, an aspect dangerously obscured by the complex abstraction processes of modern science and by the evolution of school curricula. He emphasizes that even the most contemporary science involves a method that, in this case, is directly inherited from the work of Euclid and his Hellenistic successors. A synthesis of a lifetime of research, Our Scientific Culture brings together different fields of knowledge (cosmology, chemistry, mathematics, tidal theory, etc.) and invites us to understand our scientific past in depth, the only way to free ourselves from it in order to build our future.