دانلود کتاب تاریخچه علم در جامعه

Science has transformed human history. It has changed how we see the universe, how we interact with nature and each other, and how we live our lives. It may, in the future, even change what it means to be human. The history of such a powerful force deserves a full and multifaceted examination. Yet a history of science is unlike a history of monarchs, generals, steam engines, or wars because science isn’t a person, an object, or an event. It is an idea, the idea that humans can understand the physical world. This is a history of what happens when a legion of thinkers, at different times and from different backgrounds, turned their minds and hands to the investigation of nature. In the process, they transformed the world. The history of science is such a vast subject that no single book about it can really be comprehensive, and so the story we tell examines science from a particular point of view. Some histories of science have focused on the intellectual development of ideas, while others have traced the course of particular subjects such as astronomy or physics. In this book, we have chosen to look at science from two related perspectives that we believe offer a window onto the historical processes that shaped the study of nature. First, we have examined the link between the philosophical pursuit of knowledge and the desire of both the researchers and their supporters to make that knowledge useful. There has always been a tension between the intellectual aspects of science and the application of scientific knowledge. The ancient Greek philosophers struggled with this problem, and it is still being debated today. The call in every age by philosophers and scientists for more support for “research for its own sake” is indicative of the tension between the search for knowledge and the pressure to apply that knowledge. What counts as useful knowledge differed from patron to patron and society to society, so that the Grand Duke Cosimo de’ Medici and the United States Department of Energy looked for quite different “products” to be created by their clients, but both traded support for the potential of utility.