FROM GALILEO TO NEWTON 1630-1720

This second book in the Collins' The Rise of Modern Science series has been written by its general editor and it focuses on one of the most significant periods in the development of modern science and the decisive stage of the Scientific Revolution. Hall traces in detail the changes in the spirit and ideas of science that sprang from the publication of Galileo's Dialogues on the Two Chief Systems of the World and resulted in the publication of Newton's Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy. He does not attempt to tell the full story but characterizes the nature of the changes, dealing mainly with the mathematical and physical sciences where the most profound shifts to?. However, succinct chapters do justice to the descriptive sciences which were much slower in developing. The author's method of comparing the insights, beliefs and experiments with many quotations from original sources) of such giants as Galileo, Descartes, ook, Boyle and Newton with those of the lesser men around them provides a stimulating intellectual history. Here is fledgling science throwing off Aristotle's sterile physics, digesting and then discarding Descartes' vortices, and finally, if at first grudgingly, accepting Newton's clarifying mechanistic philosophy that for the first time gave dynamics a coherent foundation... An essential book for all serious general science collections, with index, illustrations, notes and bibliography.