In the forty-five years since the publication of The Edge of Objectivity, historians of science have established a full-fledged discipline. He views science as the progressive development of more objective, detached, mathematical ways of viewing the world, and he orchestrates his characters and ideas around this theme. And throughout the book, Gillispie pushes an argument. Full of wry turns of phrase, the book effectively captures people and places. Gillispie is unafraid to rate Mendel higher than Darwin, Maxwell above Faraday. Even at six hundred pages, the book is, as the title suggests, an essay. The Edge of Objectivity is pointed, opinionated, and selective. The Edge of Objectivity arose out of this course. From start to finish-Galileo to Einstein-Gillispie introduced the students to the key ideas and individuals in science. In the mid-1950s, a young professor at Princeton named Charles Gillispie began teaching Humanities 304, one of the first undergraduate courses offered anywhere in the world on the history of science. The history of modern science is portrayed here as the development of objectivity through the study of nature. From Galileo's analysis of motion to the theories of evolution and relativity, Charles Gillispie takes us on a masterly tour of the world of scientific ideas.
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