Ingenious Pursuits

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Today the 'two cultures' - art and science - have come to be treated as fundamentally opposed. Scientific research is castigated for its inhumane methods and lack of moral responsibility, while art is treated as an enduring source of essential guidance to society's spiritual well-being. As Lisa Jardine makes clear in this remarkable book, this is a distinction which is both artificial and historically inaccurate. The intellectual revolution of the seventeenth and early-eighteenth centuries was the single most formative event in Western history, bringing together the humanities and natural sciences in an unprecedented ferment of conceptual and practical creativity. Lisa Jardine documents the forces for change which brought the human and natural sciences together and gave them shape. Each of her series of key components - among them, precise time measurement, enhanced astronomical observation, selective animal and plant breeding, and technological advances in navigation - lays a crucial part of the foundations for modern thought. She brilliantly illuminates the practice of science, its impact on the emerging modern world, and its continuing relevance to society.