An unmatched treatment of the biggest of all Big Science projects, coupled with a substantial history of pre-WWII nuclear physics and detailed portraits of Niels Bohr and J. Robert Oppenheimer, among others. A History of Geology. U. of California Press, 1995. Written by an Italian, it avoids the heavy Anglo-American bias of many older histories. What was the process? Shapin describes what happened during the scientific revolution, but it’s above all a discussion of the literature, the historiography. The chapter on Galen’s pig experiments is by Maud W. Gleason and is called, “Shock and Awe: The Performance Dimension of Galen’s Anatomy Demonstrations.” She’s absolutely right, that is exactly what it was: a performance. Ross, Dorothy. Thrower, Norman J. W. Maps and Civilization. Nye, Mary Jo. Divided into three sections: "What Was Known? Cambridge UP, 1985. What can non-historians bring to a history book that you might not get from an academic historian? Next on your list is another classic: Stephen Shapin’s The Scientific Revolution, published in 1998. U. of California Press, 1985. U. of Wisconsin Press, 1992. If you are the interviewee and would like to update your choice of books (or even just what you say about them) please email us at editor@fivebooks.com. He was a very good friend and colleague here at the University of Manchester. “Science is not just a story we tell ourselves, it is an increasingly accurate representation of how the universe works.”. His casual sexism was certainly very typical of the time. Ways of Knowing: A New History of Science, Technology, and Medicine Highly readable, with anecdotes and character sketches leavening the explanations of competing theories. Abir-Am, Pnina G., and Dorinda Outram. I was watching it with my uncle Brian in the middle of the night. Yale UP, 1991. U. of Chicago Press, 1996. Dover, 1994. If Crick had prevailed and Watson had written a more restrained account, it would probably have been less interesting. Award-winning biography of pioneer geneticist Barbara McClintock, whose studies of corn--unconventional by the standards of the time--eventually won her the Nobel Prize. The sequence of those bases is what they called in their second 1953 article in Nature (after they had described the double helix structure) ‘genetic information.’ This is what genes contain. Truth" interpretation enshrined by the play and film Inherit the Wind. Hypatia's Heritage: A History of Women in Science from Antiquity Through the Nineteenth Century. What attracted you to each of these stories? by Sandra Harding, Hating Empire Properly: The Two Indies and the Limits of Enlightenment Anticolonialism by Sunil M. Agnani, Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature by Donna J. Haraway, Beamtimes and Lifetimes: The World of High Energy Physics by Sharon Traweek, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions by Thomas S. Kuhn, A People’s History of Science: Miners, Midwives, and Low Mechanicks by Clifford D. Connor, Why I Am Not A Scientist: Anthropology and Modern Science by Jonathan M. Marks, Notes on Dialectics by C.L.R. Collections of essays on the history of anthropology that make up in depth of insight what they lack in breadth and easy accessibility. Controlling Human Heredity. It’s Not Sleeping. Pioneering collection of chapter-length biographical studies of women scientists, some familiar, most not. Oxford UP, 1989. I am especially indebted to the #WeAreMaunaKea movement for educating me and spurring me to educate myself. We’re at that stage again now: we’re under great pressure to provide impact—preferably financial in terms of patents and new processes. Gleason’s close reading of Galen’s work shows the complexity of the ideas and the events that were involved; it provides what historians call a ‘thick’ description by putting the work into its social and cultural context so you can understand it more. Note: this reading list is woefully low on materials about science in the pre-European contact Americas, Southeast Asia and parts of Australasia. Hall, A. Rupert. Science is a body of empirical, theoretical, and practical knowledge about the natural world, produced by scientists who emphasize the observation, explanation, and prediction of real-world phenomena. The Beginnings of Western Science. Origins of American Social Science. But, if I’ve understood it correctly, we often assume that science has to be the way that it is and that it’s this kind of straightforward, unquestionable route to true knowledge. Porter, Theodore M. The Rise of Statistical Thinking, 1820-1900. These are partly here not because I particularly enjoy tooting my own horn but because I found that without them, people were assuming I hadn’t contributed to the dialogue myself beyond this reading list: Making Meaning of Decolonising (in dialogue with Tucker and Yang), Intersectionality as a Blueprint for Postcolonial Scientific Community Building, Women in Astronomy: Ain’t I a woman? Lewin, Roger. Hunter. Short, fond biography of Einstein by two colleagues, with dense-but-comprehensible explanations of his science interspersed with rose-colored stories of his personal life. Kevles, Daniel J. Dictionary of Scientific Biography. Virtually all are in print as of this writing [Fall 1998], and should be readily available through large bookstores and their on-line equivalents. Herman, Ellen. Johns Hopkins UP, 1994. It’s an excellent read. Not a reference book in the conventional sense, but a collection of sixty-seven authoritative essays on the methods and contents of the history of science. Divided chronologically for the period through the Renaissance, thematically thereafter. A Feeling for the Organism. Then there was a wave of ‘industrialisation’ with the creation of larger and larger research groups. October 2017 edit: I gratefully acknowledge Duane Hamacher of the Indigenous Astronomy twitter account for suggesting texts on Australian Indigenous astronomy and for introducing me to research on subarctic Indigenous astronomy.