Baroque Science

"A new grand narrative of the mathematical Scientific Revolution, Baroque Science binds together the early modern challenges of finding epistemic order, of creating new artifices for knowledge, and of profiting from the imagination in a lucid gem of a book both technically sophisticated and accessible. Through its deft readings of Kepler, Galileo, Descartes, Hooke, and Newton, and challenging retellings of the development of optics and the inverse square law of gravitation, Baroque Science forces us anew to attend the cultural and philosophical shifts that made different mathematicizations of the world possible, compelling--as well as limiting. Passionate in subject matter and form, the book will enliven and inspire many a seminar and many a scholar."
--Matthew L. Jones, Columbia University
"How did Kepler, Descartes, Newton, and their contemporaries envision the mathematical and physical complexity of the world? In this impressive rethinking of seventeenth-century science, Ofer Gal and Raz Chen-Morris offer a new interpretation of the birth of modern science as a baroque subject born from paradox, unleashed by instruments, and reassembled in the imagination. A highly original and interdisciplinary study of the early modern natural philosopher's anxious quest to order the world."
--Paula Findlen, Stanford University
"Baroque Science will help to break down the barriers between histories of science, art, and culture in the seventeenth century, and does an excellent job of tying together diverse elements in the thinking of its protagonists through original readings of their optical, mathematical, and intellectual epistemologies."--Simon Werrett, University College London "Journal for the History of Astronomy"