FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

“Eloquently written and embracing an impressive range of topics, Dear’s The Intelligibility of Nature admirably demonstrates that historians can make trenchant comments on the present as well as the past.”
Patricia Fara, Times Literary Supplement

The Intelligibility of Nature
How Science Makes Sense of the World

Peter Dear
Now Available in Paperback

Peter Dear’s intellectual journey begins with a crucial observation: that scientific ambition is, and has been, directed toward two distinct but frequently conflated ends—doing and knowing. Teasing out this tension between doing and knowing during key episodes in the history of science, he reveals how the two principles became formalized into a single enterprise, science, that would be carried out by a new kind of person, the scientist.

“The portraits of individual scientists, from Newton, Boyle, and Faraday to Einstein and Bohr, are vivid and pithy; [Dear] has a good ear for the apt quote that lets us hear their voices.”
Eric Ormsby, New York Sun

“[Dear] shows how mechanistic explanations in physics and chemistry became ever more frequent after the industrial revolution, only to be supplanted by the nihilism of quantum theory in the social turmoil that followed the first world war. It is full of insights into how society, culture and people's perception interweave across biology, chemistry and physics.”
Adrian Barnett, New Scientist

“Scientists who wish to reflect on their vocation will gain valuable insights from this beautifully contrived book, and all readers will be prompted to think more carefully about the nature and ethos of science.”
Richard Yeo, Nature

“Dear weaves together a great deal of academic history of modern physics, chemistry, and biology into a concise, coherent, and original narrative that is introductory without ever being superficial.”
Matthew L. Jones, Science

Peter Dear is professor of science and technology studies and history at Cornell University. He is the author of Revolutionizing the Sciences: European Knowledge and Its Ambitions, 1500-1700 and Discipline and Experience: The Mathematical Way in the Scientific Revolution, the latter also published by the University of Chicago Press.

 

Peter Dear is available for interviews. For more information, please contact Carrie Olivia Adams at (773) 702-4216 or cadams@press.uchicago.edu