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Knowing and doing in the sixteenth century: what were instruments for?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 June 2003

JIM BENNETT
JIM BENNETT
Affiliation:
Museum of the History of Science, University of Oxford, Oxford, OX1 3AZ, UK.
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Abstract

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Despite recent work on scientific instruments by historians of science, the meeting ground between historians and curators of collections has been disappointingly narrow. This study offers, first, a characterization of sixteenth-century mathematical instruments, drawing on the work of curators, as represented by the online database Epact. An examination of the relationship between these instruments and the natural world suggests that the ‘theoric’, familiar from studies of the history of astronomy, has a wider relevance to the domain of practical mathematics. This outcome from a study of collections is then used in re-examining an established question in the history of science, the position of William Gilbert on the motion of the Earth.

Type
Presidential Address
Information
The British Journal for the History of Science , Volume 36 , Issue 2 , June 2003 , pp. 129 - 150
Copyright
© 2003 British Society for the History of Science