Instruments and the Imagination (Princeton Legacy Library, 311) - Livres de poche

"Instruments have a life of their own," write historians of science Thomas Hankins and Robert Silverman in this engaging study. "They do not merely follow theory; often they determine theory, because instruments determine what is possible, and what is possible determines to a large extent what can be thought." The "natural magic" of inventors such as Father Francis Linus and Athanasius Kircher introduced their contemporaries to the notion that with the proper tools nearly any advance in science was possible. And those who came after them made great advances indeed, from the 18th-century Aeolian harp, from which came the belief that light could be bent to produce sound, to automated weather stations, telestereoscopes, and early phonographs. Many of those inventions, Hankins and Silverman note, anticipated the technological advances that mark our own time, which seems itself to be full of natural magic. --Gregory McNamee