Newton's apple and other myths about science

Bibliographic Information

Newton's apple and other myths about science

edited by Ronald L. Numbers and Kostas Kampourakis

Harvard University Press, 2015

  • : cloth

Available at  / 5 libraries

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Note

Includes bibliographical references (p. [227]-270) and index

Contents of Works

  • Medieval and early modern science
  • That there was no scientific activity between Greek antiquity and the scientific revolution / Michael H. Shank
  • That before Columbus, geographers and other educated people thought the earth was flat / Lesley B. Cormack
  • That the copernican revolution demoted the status of the Earth / Michael N. Keas
  • That alchemy and astrology were superstitious pursuits that did not contribute to science and scientific understanding / Lawrence M. Principe
  • That Galileo publicly refuted Aristotle's conclusions about motion by repeated experiments made from the Campanile of Pisa / John L. Heilbron
  • That the apple fell and Newton invented the law of gravity, thus removing God from the cosmos / Patricia Fara
  • Nineteenth century
  • That Friedrich Wöhler's synthesis of urea in 1828 destroyed vitalism and gave rise to organic chemistry / Peter J. Ramberg
  • That William Paley raised scientific questions about biological origins that were eventually answered by Charles Darwin / Adam R. Shapiro
  • That nineteenth-century geologists were divided into opposing camps of Catastrophists and Uniformitarians / Julie Newell
  • That Lamarckian evolution relied largely on use and disuse and that Darwin rejected Lamarckian mechanisms / Richard W. Burkhardt Jr
  • That Darwin worked on his theory in secret for twenty years, his fears causing him to delay publication / Robert J. Richards
  • That Wallace's and Darwin's explanations of evolution were virtually the same / Michael Ruse
  • That Darwinian natural selection has been "the only game in town" / Nicolaas Rupke
  • That after Darwin (1871), sexual selection was largely ignored until Robert Trivers (1972) resurrected the theory / Erika Lorraine Milam
  • That Louis Pasteur disproved spontaneous generation on the basis of scientific objectivity / Garland E. Allen
  • That Gregor Mendel was a lonely pioneer of genetics, being ahead of his time / Kostas Kampourakis
  • That social Darwinism has had a profound influence on social thought and policy, especially in the United States of America / Ronald L. Numbers
  • Twentieth century
  • That the Michelson-Morley experiment paved the way for the special theory of relativity / Theodore Arabatzis and Kostas Gavroglu
  • That the Millikan oil-drop experiment was simple and straightforward / Mansoor Niaz
  • That neo-Darwinism defines evolution as random mutation plus natural selection / David J. Depew
  • That melanism in peppered moths is not a genuine example of evolution by natural selection / David W. Rudge
  • That Linus Pauling's discovery of the molecular basis of sickle-cell anemia revolutionized medical practice / Bruno J. Strasser
  • That the Soviet launch of Sputnik caused the revamping of American science education / John L. Rudolph
  • Generalizations
  • That religion has typically impeded the progress of science / Peter Harrison
  • That science has been largely a solitary enterprise / Kathryn M. Olesko
  • That the scientific method accurately reflects what scientists actually do / Daniel P. Thurs
  • That a clear line of demarcation has separated science from pseudoscience / Michael D. Gordin

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