The Fellowship: The Story of the Royal Society and a Scientific Revolution: The Story of a Revolution (Penguin Press Science)

by JohnGribbin (Author)

• Used

  Paperback
  2009

  $4.34

  From the bestselling author of Science: A History comes the enthralling story of a revolution that shook the world. Seventeenth-century England was racked by civil war, plague and fire; a world ruled by superstition and ignorance. A series of meetings of natural philosophers' in Oxford and London saw the beginning of a new method of thinking based on proof and experiment. John Gribbin's gripping, colourful account of this unparalleled time of discovery explores the impact of the Royal Society, culminating with Isaac Newton's revolutionary description of the universe and Edmund Halley's prediction of the return of a comet in 1759. This compelling book shows the triumph not as the work of one isolated genius, but of a Fellowship.

• Used

  Hardcover
  2005

  $3.25

  John Gribbin, bestselling author of In Search of Schroedinger's Cat, explores the defining decades of the seventeenth century's scientific revolution, when the Royal Society established what became 'the' scientific method, a way of doing and communicating science that set the tone for the three and a half centuries that followed. In The Fellowship he describes the origins of the Royal Society, which grew out of meetings held in Oxford during the Civil War, and latterly in London, among 'natural philosophers', especially through the efforts of three men: William Gilbert, Francis Bacon, and William Harvey. The extraordinary return in 1759 of a comet that, on the basis of Newton's theory of gravity, had been predicted by Edmond Halley, marked the triumph of this scientific revolution.