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Though geology is not especially glamorous, especially nowadays when the earth's vast age is no longer scientifically novel, I recommend this book to anyone interested in the breadth of the scientific endeavor. During his career Steno established a core of principles that have driven the field of geology ever since.In Steno's work, the book shows what goes on during the birth of a science -- or, the birth of science. Even persons whose interests don't really extend to geology will have much to appreciate in the essentially scientific story of Steno turning from folk knowledge to empirical, logical science. This book successfully achieves a rare combination of the two ingredients most non-technical science books attempt to unite: 1) compelling elements of human narrative and 2) clearly and accurately delivered science.The book focuses on a man who went by the name of Steno (among others). Steno noticed that much received knowledge in his life turned out to be empirically false, and so he dedicated himself to rebuilding factual knowledge of nature from the ground up.
But this book is more than a biography of Nicholaus Steno: it is a magnificent tapestry depicting the interplay of faith (or atheism) with the scientific data known at the time and the personalities of those with competing theories to explain a simple phenomenon. Alan Cutler has done an admirable job bringing to life the debates, questions, and controversies that faced the scientists of the seventeenth century.
We now know it as geology. This incredibly readable book is indeed the story of the birth of a science.
This book details the life and times of a brilliant Danish anatomist, turned geologist, turned priest, bishop, then saint. It is difficult to imagine today why and how this simple fact generated a debate spanning some 150 years and how Steno's simple but elegant explanation was all but lost for many of them.
If you are at all interested in this topic you will love this book. His contemporaries were the likes of Sir Isaac Newton, Robert Hooke, the philosophers Leibniz, Spinoza and Voltaire.
Why are seashells found on the tops of mountains.
His brilliant lectures demolished Decartes' theories on the brain, and paved the way for new understandings of anatomy. He eventually came to the conclusion that the seashell fossils inside the mountains were the result of the ocean once covering entire areas, and that sediments, in which fossils were trapped, layered on top of each other. Nicholaus Steno did too, and through his inquiry and investigation, discovered the geologic concept of "deep time"- discovering the age of the earth by examining the sedimentary layers.
At the time, most people thought that fossils literally grew inside rocks, through "plastic forces of nature." (The scientific world had not yet outgrown Aristotle's physics). Steno's discovery made Bishop Ussher's creation date of 4004 BC untenable, since it would have taken the seas far longer to recede than Noah's flood was supposed to have lasted. Steno argued that the fossils could not possibly grow inside rocks, because they weren't distorted the way that objects that actually did grow inside rocks were.
Ever wonder why there are seashells in rocks or in buildings made out of rocks. The "tongue stones" in the shark's mouth looked remarkably similar to the ones that he had seen in rocks. This book is highly recommended for anyone who is interested in the history of scientific discovery, and how someone's curiosity can change the way people think about the world.
Steno was a Danish scientist who originally went into anatomy. His interest in fossils was sparked by a shark's head that he was using for one of his lectures.
If you enjoy this book, you'll also enjoy: The Ice Finders; The Man Who Discovered Time; Out of the Flames; The Lunar Men; World on Fire. We are privileged to live in a Golden Age of writing about the history of science. Several other reviewers have already sung the praises, aptly, of this book, so I will merely recommend a few other titles.
Goulden misunderstands what is meant by a "titular bishop". Back to science: as a scientist who has read many books on science history and many biographies of scientists, I can attest that this is one of the very best. The book is very readable, and gives a fascinating picture of how people in various ages saw the history of the earth. There he labored in very difficult conditions for the salvation of souls and the better treatment of the poor. Only a small minority of books on science or scientists manage to discuss the historical relation between science and religion with anything approaching balance and accuracy.
There was nothing tragic about the end of his life, but rather (from a Christian point of view) something quite glorious. Raul Goulden below. Second, Steno/Stensen did not convert because of love of ritual, but, as Cutler makes very clear in the book, for serious theological reasons, and after a deep study of early Church history. A gem. Every bishop in the Catholic Church is given, in addition to his actual diocese, a purely ceremonial title as bishop of some diocese that is no longer in existence. Stensen was never actually sent to a place in the Muslim world, as Goulden supposes.
This book is excellent in that regard. First, Steno/Stensen was never sent to the city of which he was made "titular bishop". He was given a real diocese in northern (predominantly Lutheran) Europe. Cutler does not appear to be religious himself, yet he has a very sound grasp of the complex historic interplay between science and religion. (There is a kind of custom that dioceses never go out of legal existence, so that dioceses that existed in ancient times, but where there is no longer a city or where the population is now Muslim, say, still exist "on the books"). Mr.
I cannot refrain from correcting some mistakes of Mr. That never happens.
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