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    Steven Shapin
    The Scientific Life: A Moral History of a Late Modern Vocation
    "In this brilliant book Shapin takes us from celebration and criticism to description and understanding of one of the most important phenomena of the twentieth century—the creation of technical novelties. Richly paradoxical and entertaining, The Scientific Life contrasts the evidence-free moralizing of the cultural critics and early sociologists of science with the often insightful analyses of the despised industrial researchers."—David Edgerton, author of The Shock of the Old
    Read an interview with the author.

       

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    Mark Monmonier
    Coast Lines: How Mapmakers Frame the World and Chart Environmental Change
    "Coastlines take on a completely different meaning after reading Mark Monmonier's five-century-long odyssey on the challenges and tricks that mapmakers have used to tell us where land and sea meet. That line is far from obvious, it turns out. With the prospect of rising global sea levels, the technique of mapping changing bays, estuaries, and deltas requires imagination as much as mathematics."—Christopher Hallowell, author of Holding Back the Sea

       

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    Martin J. S. Rudwick
    Worlds Before Adam: The Reconstruction of Geohistory in the Age of Reform
    "We take for granted that Earth has a deep history divided into eras such as the Mesozoic, with its monstrous dinosaurs and catastrophic meteoroid impacts. But when and how was this geohistorical narrative established? This book is a masterly exploration of the nineteenth-century roots of this particular scientific revolution."—Douglas Palmer, New Scientist

       

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    Robert J. Richards
    The Tragic Sense of Life: Ernst Haeckel and the Struggle over Evolutionary Thought
    "The Tragic Sense of Life is a masterwork of scholarship. Robert Richards brings vividly to life one of the most fascinating figures in the history of science and chronicles and assesses his achievements."—Michael Ruse, Florida State University

       

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    Matthew Hedman
    The Age of Everything: How Science Explores the Past
    "We are used to being told confidently of an enormous, measurable past: that some collection of dusty bones is tens of thousands of years old, or that astronomical bodies have an age of some billions. But how exactly do scientists come to know these things? That is the subject of this quite fascinating book.… As told by Hedman, an astronomer, each story is a marvel of compressed exegesis that takes into account some of the most modern and intriguing hypotheses."—Steven Poole, The Guardian
    Read an excerpt.

       

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    Peter Dear
    The Intelligibility of Nature: How Science Makes Sense of the World
    "The Intelligibility of Nature is a very impressive and compelling book about the relationship between instrumentalism and realism in the sciences from 1600 to 1950. Peter Dear argues for a fascinating reinterpretation of the Scientific Revolution and its aftermath, showing how between the time of Descartes and that of Lavoisier, natural philosophy and practical techniques merged: that process, this book shows, was decisive for the emergence of modern science. This is a lucid and intelligent history."—Simon Schaffer

       

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    William R. Newman
    Atoms and Alchemy: Chymistry and the Experimental Origins of the Scientific Revolution
    "Newman … maintains that alchemists, especially the 17th-century Robert Boyle, provided proof of atoms and therefore laid the foundations of the contemporary science. Newman shows immense scholarship in this book: even its long introduction is loaded with extensive footnotes."—Roy Herbert, New Scientist

       

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    Charles Thorpe
    Oppenheimer: The Tragic Intellect
    "He is known as the father of the atomic bomb, but J. Robert Oppenheimer was much more than that. As scientific director of the Los Alamos atomic weapons laboratory during the second world war, Oppenheimer was a social symbol, a 'nodal point' where scientific, political and military interests clashed. It is this sociological aspect of his life that Thorpe focuses on here."—Sam Kean, New Scientist

       

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    Ronald N. Giere
    Scientific Perspectivism
    "Does science deliver the unvarnished truth, or is it some kind of social construct? Giere resolves this opposition, deciding in favor of both sides by exposing the conflict as an artifact of a problematic assumption that both sides—and most of us—are making. Just one of many insights! A must read for anyone with any interest in understanding science.'—Paul Teller

       

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    Laura J. Snyder
    Reforming Philosophy: A Victorian Debate on Science and Society
    "Reforming Philosophy is a superb piece of work that fills out in needed detail the debates in the mid-nineteenth century about the nature of good science. … This book will be required reading for students of the period as well as for those interested in the way that science defined itself through the ages."—Michael Ruse

       

    Historical, philosophical, and social studies of science and technology

    from the University of Chicago Press

    The books in this subject catalog are not all the books published by the University of Chicago Press in this field, but only our most recent and important books. We recommend you start with this catalog. For a more extensive listing you may go to the subject index of our complete catalog, or you may search our title database using a subject term. To see just our very latest books (titles released in the last six months) go to our new releases pages.

    Books for general readers

    General issues in history, philosophy, and social studies of science

    Biological sciences and medicine

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