This article uses the corollaries on the densities of the planets in Book III of Isaac Newton's Principia and the manuscript notes in his personal edition of Nicolaus Mercator's astronomical textbook to reveal a social history of both the reception of Newton's cosmology and physical astronomy, and its initial conception and development.
This paper examines how the seventeenth-century Dutch Cartesian Johannes de Raey sought to reconcile the philosophies of Descartes and Aristotle. It focuses on De Raey's identification in Aristotle of a doctrine corresponding to Descartes's subtle matter and asks which strand of the Aristotelian tradition he relied on for this identification. The study centres on De Raey's 1652 disputation De materia subtili and also draws on his lecture notes preserved in manuscript form, his earliest disputation, and the disputations of his teacher Henricus Regius, in which De Raey often served as respondent. The analysis shows, first, that De Raey interpreted Aristotle as positing a subtle body analogous to the element of the stars. Second, it argues that De Raey arrived at this reading by relying on the interpretation of the Generation of Animals by the Wittenberg medical professor Daniel Sennert, whose works De Raey encountered early in his career while studying medicine under Regius. Finally, De Raey gave Sennert's interpretation a decisively materialist turn, thereby making it possible to read Aristotle within a corpuscular, Cartesian framework. In this respect, he can be placed within the broader seventeenth-century movement to reinterpret Sennert's Aristotelianism in corpuscular terms.
This essay explores the representations and uses of animal pain in early modern Italian anatomy and agronomy, focusing on the pig as both an experimental subject and a productive resource. Between the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, anatomists including Andreas Vesalius, Realdo Colombo, Carlo Fracassati and Marcello Malpighi relied on nonhuman bodies - especially pigs and dogs - to investigate the mechanisms of life. The animal's cry served simultaneously as evidence of suffering and as a confirmation of scientific authority. Concurrently, the agronomist Vincenzo Tanara emphasized the pig's profitability within rural economies, and the writer Giulio Cesare Croce praised its value to urban life. By combining the history of anatomy, the history of agronomy and the history of food, this study shows how pigs, living and dead, occupied a nexus of compassion and exploitation, anatomical knowledge and food production. The pig reveals a distinctive configuration of early modern knowledge, where ideas about animal utility not only circulated between different knowledge and practices, such as anatomy agronomy and cookery, but were also shaped by the porous boundaries between them.
This article reads the antiquary and Fellow of the Royal Society Edward Lhwyd's works with attention to the different forms of questioning which he associated with various forms of natural enquiry. It argues that Lhwyd associated two forms of question - the 'Query' and the quaestio - with different styles of information: in Lhwyd's view, 'Queries' asked for precise, observed points of fact; quaestiones were discursive, argumentative prompts for thought not strictly dependent on experiment or observations, and connected with the oldest forms of university education and examination. Building on Richard Yeo's work, the article argues that Lhwyd divided his own preoccupations along these lines: for his lexicographical and local-historical work, he produced a voluminous set of 'Parochial Queries'; by contrast, when he addressed the hotly controverted and apparently insoluble question of the Earth's origin and the deposition of fossils, he referred to the matter persistently as a quaestio. The article further shows the possible influences on Lhwyd in making this latter move: the influence of John Ray's Three Physico-Theological Discourses; Lhwyd's personal animus against Robert Plot; and Lhwyd's more generally unorthodox academic credentials all contributed, I argue, to his use of the much-disputed quaestio.
This paper explores the evolving relationship between the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) and the emerging international governance of atomic energy during the early Cold War. In the mid-1950s, widespread public concern that nuclear weapons testing might influence the weather prompted the WMO to investigate the atmospheric effects of atomic explosions. The organization initially envisioned coordinating international research on atomic weather and proposed the creation of a global network of monitoring stations to measure atmospheric radioactivity. This paper shows how these ambitions unfolded within a rapidly evolving institutional landscape shaped by Cold War geopolitics. The founding of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) in 1957 marked a turning point in the WMO's nuclear engagement. Gradually, the WMO's efforts were curtailed by institutional competition, limited resources for technical assistance, and shifting geopolitical priorities. By the early 1960s, the organization had assumed a supporting role in the emerging architecture of international atomic governance.
This paper presents a hitherto unknown seventeenth-century component-by-component description of a four-lens terrestrial telescope attributed to Galileo Galilei (1564-1642), complete with diagrams and measurements. The author is the Spanish friar Ignacio Muñoz O.P. (ca. 1608/1612-1686), who penned it on August 8, 1666, in Mexico City. The owner of the telescope was Antonio Sebastián de Toledo Molina y Salazar (1608-1715), II Marquis of Mancera and viceroy of New Spain (1664-1673). Images of the source, a transcription in the original Latin, an English translation, and the measured values derived from the piece-by-piece analysis are provided. The study also contextualizes the document and examines the reliability of the attribution, reflecting on its potential implications for the history of the telescope.
Contemporaries who only knew Newton's natural philosophy from his published works would have seen him as a thinker who was thoroughly opposed to the concept of an all-pervasive universal aether. There was no need, mathematically or physically, for an aether in the natural philosophy presented in his Principia (1687). Newton insisted that an aether was not only not required, but would actually prevent the smooth running of the world system. This state of affairs changed dramatically, however, when Newton published the second English edition of the Opticks (1717). In a series of eight new 'Queries' interpolated into the sequence of speculative proposals which brought the Opticks to a conclusion, Newton suggested that an aether might be responsible for some optical phenomena and even for gravitational attraction. The aim of this article is to show that this was not a concession on Newton's part to the age-old concept of a mechanical aether, working by material contact action, but was rather a further attempt to promote the speculative physics, presented in earlier queries, which was based on the assumption that many phenomena may be explained by attractive and repulsive forces operating between the invisibly small particles of matter which were held to constitute all bodies.
This essay investigates the reception of William Gilbert's foundational work on magnetism, De Magnete, through a comprehensive analysis of extant copies of its early modern printed editions (1600, 1628, 1629, 1633). By employing a hybrid methodology combining quantitative and qualitative approaches to readers' annotations, this study charts patterns of engagement with Gilbert's text across diverse contexts and intellectual traditions. While celebrated for its experimental innovations and practical applications in navigation, it also elicited cosmological and humanist interests. Statistical analyses of readers' marks demonstrate a skewed distribution of engagement, with the majority of annotations concentrated in a small fraction of extant copies. This study moreover contributes to the historiography of early modern science by illustrating the methodological potential of combining large-scale digital datasets with close textual analysis, advocating for more systematic, collaborative approaches to the history of reading and book culture. In addition, a near-complete census of copies of De magnete is provided.
This article provides a reading of Marcantonio De Dominis' De radiis visus et lucis (1611) in light of the discovery of its substantial dependence on Cesare Cremonini's manuscript De iride. The relationship between the two works is examined by comparing their structure and diagrams. Placing De radiis into context with the long-standing perspectivist tradition and the sixteenth-century development in optics, this article analyses how De Dominis' argumentative strategy was carried out, with particular reference to the alternative between extramission and intromission and the use of the concept of refraction. It is argued that De Dominis addressed issues advanced, among others, by Giambattista Della Porta, to build a coherent optical theory based on Aristotelian-oriented concepts and notions. Moreover, the article analyses how the general purpose of De Dominis' De radiis provides context to his way of rethinking the theoretical novelty of the telescope, announced in Galileo Galilei's Sidereus nuncius.
Historians of science and religion have occasionally resorted to stereotypes, rejecting harmonious accounts without clear justifications. This article chronicles the creation and reception history of Religion and the Rise of Modern Science (1972), written by one so-called harmony promoting historian, Reijer Hooykaas (1906-1994). Over the decades, the book has received substantial criticism and praise. Based on our research on publications and archival materials - primarily comprising correspondence between Hooykaas, friends, colleagues, and publishers - we show that the multifaceted creation history of Religion and the Rise of Modern Science (RRMS) has significantly impacted its reception. We argue that the book, and, by extension, Hooykaas's scholarship on science and religion, has been too easily discarded as Protestant apologetics at worst and as an attempt to harmonize science and religion at best. Painting a picture of the dynamics of the science and religion field during its formative years from the 1960s onwards, this article is a call to take the complexity principle seriously when conducting historiography in the science and religion field instead of merely framing previous research as a counterpoint.
From the publication of Descartes's Dioptrique in 1637 to the end of the century, leading English scholars declared their preference for 'Aristotle, not des Cartes'. Modern commentators tended to interpret these declarations as defences of tradition or theologically motivated manoeuvres, yet the positions of these savants, especially concerning perception, were closer to Descartes's than to Aristotle's: they shunned substantial forms and their theories were materialistic and causal. We examine the works of John Sergeant (1621-1707) and his intellectual predecessors, Thomas White (1593-1676) and Kenelm Digby (1603-1665), to show that these thinkers were above all concerned with the troubling implications of Descartes's theory of vision. If the eye is just a screen on which mere stains of light fall, vision and the senses in general, deliver to the mind 'nothing of the thing'. This 'estrangement', as we call it, rather than the ontological dichotomy between body and soul, was the problem they sought to address. They turned to Aristotle to reinstate the once taken-for-granted compatibility between humans and their world.
This paper presents the peculiar story of the drop, a non-standard unit which outlived the standardizing forces of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, as an instructive lens for understanding how and why non-standard units survive. With the establishment of the metric system in France came a large-scale discussion on the merits of various units, the drop among them. Some partisans of the metric system argued that this unstandardizable unit should be abandoned in favour of decimal weight units. Despite this, the drop remained in use in both lay and scientific contexts. By closely studying medical and chemical practice, we show that the drop was a rich tool for both communication and scientific quantification. The drop's utility went beyond cases where achieving precision was superfluous; drops were also used by practitioners in ways that could not easily be replaced by the scales, accomplishing aims for which standard units were ill-adapted or even damaging to the task at hand. The drop's familiar and flexible nature made it uniquely useful in instructions to be carried out by lay people or factory workers, as well as in the many experimental procedures that required the practitioner's attention to be directed at sensory indications.
This article explores the interdisciplinary career and overlooked legacy of Henri Devaux (1862-1956), a French botanist-turned-physicist whose pioneering work on thin films and surface science predated the field's maturity. Trained as a botanist, Devaux crossed disciplinary boundaries to make foundational contributions to the study of thin films anticipating key developments in molecular biology and colloid chemistry. Despite this, his work remains marginalized in narratives dominated by figures like Irving Langmuir and Agnes Pockels. Devaux's career reflects the tensions of disciplinary transgression in early 20th-century France, bridging botany, physics, and chemistry while serving as an "ambassador" of plant physiology within physics. His devout Protestant faith further shaped his scientific identity: he framed research as a divine mission and conceived of "Complete Science"-a synthesis of empirical inquiry and religious revelation-that distinguished him from both secular and Catholic contemporaries. Drawing on his personal archives, this study argues that Devaux's legacy was shaped by experimental ingenuity, religious conviction, and deliberate navigation between institutional constraints. His story challenges standard narratives of scientific progress, illuminating how personal belief and disciplinary boundary-crossing can simultaneously drive innovation and limit historical recognition.
The transition from atomic models of the old quantum theory to the wave mechanics of mature quantum mechanics entailed a change from electronic orbits to orbitals. The former look like planets orbiting a central star, while orbitals are electronic wave functions interpreted as probability densities. In this paper, we investigate early attempts to create pictorial images of the electronic probability density in the hydrogen atom. We analyse various approaches to visualize solutions to the Schrödinger equation for atomic hydrogen from first attempts in the early 1930s until the advent of modern computer graphics in the 1970s. We replicate the approaches by White (1931), DeVault (1944) and Wiswesser (1945) and discuss their intrinsic features and limitations. The translation of abstract mathematical probability densities into tangible and broadly accessible pictorial representations of orbitals is a complex process that critically depends on the concepts and tools available for graphical representation.
