M. Biagioli & J. Riskin 
Nature Engaged 
Science in Practice from the Renaissance to the Present

This volume gathers essays that focus on the worldliness of science, its inseparable engagement in the major institutional bases of social life: law, market, church, school, and nation. With a chronological span reaching from the Renaissance to Big Science, its topics range from sundials to genetic sequences, from calculating instruments to devices that simulate human behavior, from early cartography to techniques for tracing radioactive fallout on a global scale. The book aims to show readers, with episodes drawn from the span of their modern history, the sciences in action throughout human society.

Table of Content

Introduction: Nature Engaged; M.Biagioli & J.Riskin PART I: CONVENTIONS Scientific Meetings and Technical Standards; K.Alder Practicing Eighteenth-Century Science Today; H.Chang The Textbook Case of a Priority Dispute; M.D.Gordin Complex Systems and Total War; D.Pestre PART II: LAWS Witnessing Astronomy: Kepler on the Uses and Misuses of Testimony; M.Biagioli Improvement for Profit: Calculating Machines and the Prehistory of Intellectual Property; M.L.Jones Genes, Railroads and Regulations; D.J.Kevles Epidemiology in Court; T.Golan PART III: NARRATIVES Mercator Maps Time; A.Grafton Rethinking 1633: Writing about Galileo After the Trial; P.Findlen PART IV: THINGS Machines in the Garden; J.Riskin Cosmography and the Meaning of Sundials; J.Bennett The Web of Knowing and Doing: William Thomson’s Apparatus Room and the History of Electricity; G.Pancaldi

About the author

MARIO BIAGIOLO is Distinguished Professor of STS, Law, and History at the University of California at Davis, USA.
JESSICA RISKIN
is an Associate Professor of History at Stanford University, USA.