Antony van Leeuwenhoek, Clifford Dobell, and Robert Hooke

Galileo’s parabolic trajectory launched a new approach to physics that was taken up by a new generation of scientists like Isaac Newton, Robert Hooke and Edmund Halley. The English Newtonian tradition was adopted by ambitious French iconoclasts who championed Newton over their own Descartes. Chief among these was Pierre Maupertuis, whose principle of least action was developed by Leonhard Euler and Joseph Lagrange into a rigorous new science of dynamics. Along the way, Maupertuis became embroiled in a famous dispute that entangled the King of Prussia as well as the volatile Voltaire who was mourning the death of his mistress Emilie du Chatelet, the lone female French physicist of the eighteenth century.

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The Curious Eye

10.1093/oso/9780198850199.001.0001 ◽

2020 ◽

Author(s):

Erin Webster

Keyword(s):

Seventeenth Century ◽

Human Vision ◽

Francis Bacon ◽

Robert Hooke ◽

Robert Boyle ◽

Isaac Newton ◽

Johannes Kepler ◽

The Social ◽

The Subject ◽

Historical Moment

The Curious Eye explores early modern debates over two related questions: what are the limits of human vision, and to what extent can these limits be overcome by technological enhancement? Today, in our everyday lives we rely on optical technology to provide us with information about visually remote spaces even as we question the efficacy and ethics of such pursuits. But the debates surrounding the subject of technologically mediated vision have their roots in a much older literary tradition in which the ability to see beyond the limits of natural human vision is associated with philosophical and spiritual insight as well as social and political control. The Curious Eye provides insight into the subject of optically mediated vision by returning to the literature of the seventeenth century, the historical moment in which human visual capacity in the West was first extended through the application of optical technologies to the eye. Bringing imaginative literary works by Francis Bacon, John Milton, Margaret Cavendish, and Aphra Behn together with optical and philosophical treatises by Johannes Kepler, René Descartes, Robert Hooke, Robert Boyle, and Isaac Newton, The Curious Eye explores the social and intellectual impact of the new optical technologies of the seventeenth century on its literature. At the same time, it demonstrates that social, political, and literary concerns are not peripheral to the optical science of the period but rather an integral part of it, the legacy of which we continue to experience.

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Hooke recommemorated

Notes and Records the Royal Society journal of the history of science ◽

10.1098/rsnr.1996.0013 ◽

1996 ◽

Vol 50 (1) ◽

pp. 139-140

Keyword(s):

Social Life ◽

Royal Society ◽

Early Years ◽

Domestic Life ◽

Robert Hooke ◽

Arts And Sciences ◽

Personal Interaction ◽

The Arts ◽

Christ Church ◽

History Of

Richard Nichols, The Diaries of Robert Hooke, The Leonardo of London, 1635-1703 . Lewes, Sussex: The Book Guild, 1994, Pp. 185, £15.00. ISBN 0- 86332-930-6. Richard Nichols is a science master turned historian of science who celebrates in this book Robert Hooke’s contributions to the arts and sciences. The appreciation brings together comments from Hooke’s Diaries , and other works, on each of his main enterprises, and on his personal interaction with each of his principal friends and foes. Further references to Hooke and his activities are drawn from Birch’s History of the Royal Society, Aubrey’s Brief Lives , and the Diaries of Evelyn and of Pepys. The first section of the book, ‘Hooke the Man’, covers his early years of education at home in Freshwater, at Westminster school and at Christ Church, Oxford, where he soon joined the group of experimental philosophers who set him up as Curator of the Royal Society and Professor of Geometry at Gresham College, Bishopsgate. Hooke’s domestic life at Gresham College is described - his intimate relationships with a series of housekeepers, including his niece, Grace Hooke, and his social life at the College and in the London coffee houses.

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Robert Hooke: A fractographic study of Kettering–stone

Notes and Records the Royal Society journal of the history of science ◽

10.1098/rsnr.1997.0005 ◽

1997 ◽

Vol 51 (1) ◽

pp. 45-55 ◽

Cited By ~ 1

Author(s):

Derek Hull

Keyword(s):

Royal Society ◽

The Other ◽

Microscopical Observation ◽

Robert Hooke ◽

Fractographic Study

Observ. XV. illustrated by Schem. IX. Figur:1 (figure 1 of this paper) in Robert Hooke's Micrographia (1665)1 is a description of Kettering–stone ‘which is brought from Kettering in Northampton–shire, and digg’d out of a Quarry, as I am inform'd’. As Curator of Experiments for the Royal Society from 1662, Hooke was charged by the Society to bring in at every meeting one microscopical observation at least. The minutes of the Society2 record that on 15 April 1663 ‘Mr Hooke showed the Company two Microscopicall Schemas; one representing the Pores of Cork … the other a Kettering Stone, appearing to be composed of Globules; and those hollow ones, each having 3 Coatings, sticking to one another, and so making up one entire firm stone’.

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Some 'Philosophicall Scribbles' attributed to Robert Hooke

Notes and Records the Royal Society journal of the history of science ◽

10.1098/rsnr.1980.0002 ◽

1980 ◽

Vol 35 (1) ◽

pp. 17-32 ◽

Cited By ~ 7

Keyword(s):

Common Sense ◽

Trinity College ◽

Robert Hooke ◽

Separate Sheet ◽

The World ◽

The Common ◽

Almost All

Among the Hooke manuscripts held in the Library of Trinity College, Cambridge, is an undated document of four pages, entitled (on a separate sheet): XVI Philosophicall Scribbles’. We shall offer here an edition of this hitherto unpublished document; its contents will be discussed and compared with Hooke’s published theories of the soul, mind action and memory in his ‘Lectures of light’ (I); and some consideration will be given to the general adequacy of Hooke’s epistemology, as revealed in the ‘Scribbles’ and the ‘Lectures of light’, and its place in history. A transcription of the ‘Philosophicall scribbles’ reads as follows: It has pleased y e al wise contriuer of y e Universe to send man into the world almost/ready tempered,/like a peice of soft wax to receiue those impressions and stamps, which he has though[t] it most conuenient to receiue, though altogether unfit for/some/other perhaps, which his infinite wisdom saw good to w th hold. Those stamps are only of five kinds. And are generally comprisd under one name, to wit The Objects of Sense, /and this ? is calld the common sense,/But this is only that passiue facully [ sic ] w ch this lump or mass of bodys come furnished w th all, w ch is much y e same w th what y e bodys of almost all animalls are as well if not in a better manner endowed.

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