Nature Engaged

1. Front Matter

   Pages i-xi

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2. Introduction: A Mingled Yarn

   1. Introduction: A Mingled Yarn

      • Jessica Riskin

      Pages 1-15

3. Conventions

   1. Front Matter

      Pages 17-17

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   2. Scientific Conventions: International Assemblies and Technical Standards from the Republic of Letters to Global Science

      • Ken Alder

      Pages 19-39

   3. Practicing Eighteenth-Century Science Today

      • Hasok Chang

      Pages 41-58

   4. The Textbook Case of a Priority Dispute: D. I. Mendeleev, Lothar Meyer, and the Periodic System

      • Michael D. Gordin

      Pages 59-82

   5. Complex Systems and Total War: British Operational Research and the PM Statistical Branch at the Beginning of World War II

      • Dominique Pestre

      Pages 83-100

4. Laws

   1. Front Matter

      Pages 101-101

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   2. Witnessing Astronomy: Kepler on the Uses and Misuses of Testimony

      • Mario Biagioli

      Pages 103-123

   3. Improvement for Profit: Calculating Machines and the Prehistory of Intellectual Property

      • Matthew L. Jones

      Pages 125-146

   4. Genes, Railroads, and Regulations: Intellectual Property and the Public Interest

      • Daniel J. Kevles

      Pages 147-162

   5. Epidemiology, Tort, and the Relations between Science and Law in the Twentieth-Century American Courtroom

      • Tal Golan

      Pages 163-183

5. Histories

   1. Front Matter

      Pages 185-185

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   2. Mercator Maps Time

      • Anthony Grafton

      Pages 187-204

   3. Rethinking 1633: Writing about Galileo after the Trial

      • Paula Findlen

      Pages 205-226

6. Things

   1. Front Matter

      Pages 227-227

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   2. Machines in the Garden

      • Jessica Riskin

      Pages 229-248

   3. Cosmography and the Meaning of Sundials

      • Jim Bennett

      Pages 249-262

   4. The Web of Knowing, Doing, and Patenting: William Thomson’s Apparatus Room and the History of Electricity

      • Giuliano Pancaldi

      Pages 263-285

7. Back Matter

   Pages 287-301

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This volume gathers essays that focus on the worldliness of science, its inseparable engagement in the major institutional bases of social life: law, market, church, school, and nation. With a chronological span reaching from the Renaissance to Big Science, its topics range from sundials to genetic sequences, from calculating instruments to devices that simulate human behavior, from early cartography to techniques for tracing radioactive fallout on a global scale. The book aims to show readers, with episodes drawn from the span of their modern history, the sciences in action throughout human society.

• astronomy
• church
• essay
• Galileo Galilei
• history
• history of literature
• law
• nation
• nature
• prehistory
• present
• renaissance
• science
• writing

'The nature/nurture dichotomy has lost its grip in biology. So too, in the new history of science on display in this volume, science and culture no longer struggle against one another. Mutually entangled, they are also mutually enriching and constantly throw up surprises, from the boiling point of water to the meaning of a sundial to the legal status of a gene.' - M. Norton Wise, University of California, Los Angeles, USA

'In this remarkable assembly of essays, the authors take some of the oldest topics in the history of science (priority, experiments, devices, international meetings, for example) and rewrite them in a strikingly new register. Thoroughly historical, engagingly written, these inquiries show us how patents rewrite the very idea of innovation, how mechanisms alter philosophy, how biblical chronology engages astronomy. In the range and depth of their vision of history of science in a world of war, industry, and the academy, the book is a fine tribute to John Heilbron's illustrious career in history of science; at the same time, Nature Engaged stands on its own as a delightful glimpse of some of the best work we have.' - Peter L. Galison, Joseph Pellegrino University Professor and Director, Collection of Historical Scientific Instruments, Hardvard University, USA

MARIO BIAGIOLO is Distinguished Professor of STS, Law, and History at the University of California at Davis, USA.
JESSICA RISKIN is an Associate Professor of History at Stanford University, USA.

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