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3 books match the query 'Creative ability in science'

cover of Baroque Science

Baroque Science

Ofer Gal and Raz Chen-Morris

University of Chicago Press, 2013

In Baroque Science, Ofer Gal and Raz Chen-Morris present a radically new perspective on the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century. Instead of celebrating the triumph of reason and rationality, they study the paradoxes and anxieties that stemmed from the New Science and the intellectual compromises that shaped it and enabled its spectacular success.
 
Gal and Chen-Morris show how the protagonists of the new mathematical natural philosophy grasped at the very far and very small by entrusting observation to the mediation of artificial instruments, and how they justified this mediation by naturalizing and denigrating the human senses. They show how the physical-mathematical ordering of heavens and earth demanded obscure and spurious mathematical procedures, replacing the divine harmonies of the late Renaissance with an assemblage of isolated, contingent laws and approximated constants.  Finally, they show how the new savants, forced to contend that reason is hopelessly estranged from its surrounding world and that nature is irreducibly complex, turned to the passions to provide an alternative, naturalized foundation for their epistemology and ethics.
 
Enforcing order in the face of threatening chaos, blurring the boundaries of the natural and the artificial, and mobilizing the passions in the service of objective knowledge, the New Science, Gal and Chen-Morris reveal, is a Baroque phenomenon: deeply entrenched in and crucially formative of the culture of its time.
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cover of Exceptional Creativity in Science and Technology: Individuals, Institutions, and Innovations

Exceptional Creativity in Science and Technology

Individuals, Institutions, and Innovations

Andrew Robinson

Templeton Press, 2013

In the evolution of science and technology, laws governing exceptional creativity and innovation have yet to be discovered. In his influential study The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, the historian Thomas Kuhn noted that the final stage in a scientific breakthrough such as Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity—the most crucial step—was “inscrutable.” The same is still true half a century later.
 
Yet, there has been considerable progress in understanding many stages and facets of exceptional creativity and innovation. In Exceptional Creativity in Science and Technology, editor Andrew Robinson gathers diverse contributors to explore this progress. This new collection arises from a symposium with the same title held at the Institute for Advanced Study (IAS) in Princeton. Organized by the John Templeton Foundation, the symposium had the late distinguished doctor and geneticist Baruch S. Blumberg as its chair. At the same time, its IAS host was the well-known physicist Freeman J. Dyson—both of whom have contributed chapters to the book. In addition to scientists, engineers, and an inventor, the book’s fifteen contributors include an economist, entrepreneurs, historians, and sociologists, all working at leading institutions, including Bell Laboratories, Microsoft Research, Oxford University, Princeton University, and Stanford University. Each contributor brings a unique perspective to the relationships between exceptional scientific creativity and innovation by individuals and institutions.
 
The diverse list of disciplines covered, the high-profile contributors (including two Nobel laureates), and their fascinating insights into this overarching question—how exactly do we make breakthroughs?—will make this collection of interest to anyone involved with the creative process in any context. Still, it will especially appeal to readers in scientific and technological fields.
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cover of Metaphysics, Materialism, and the Evolution of Mind: The Early Writings of Charles Darwin

Metaphysics, Materialism, and the Evolution of Mind

The Early Writings of Charles Darwin

Charles Darwin

University of Chicago Press, 1980

First published in 1974 as a companion volume to Darwin on Man by Howard E. Gruber, Paul Barrett’s transcriptions of Darwin’s M and N notebooks served to shed new light on the evolutionist’s methods and motivation.

According to Stephen Jay Gould in the New York Times Book Review, “Darwin kept [these notebooks] primarily in 1838, when he was 29 years old. In them, he recorded his early conviction of evolutionary continuity between humans and all other animals. . . . These notebooks display all the features of humanistic intellect that his detractors denied. We find erudition in his comments on Plato, Locke, Hume, Adam Smith, Whewell, Burke, Montaigne, Lessing and Spencer. . . . We appreciate an artistic bent in his delight with nature and her prophet Wordsworth. . . . We grasp the breadth of his bold attempt to clothe all human thought and behaviour in a new evolutionary garb. . . . Charles Darwin was reconstructing the world and he knew exactly what he was doing.” 

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