Want to know what books Philip Ball recommends? We've researched interviews, social media posts, podcasts, and articles to build a comprehensive list of Philip Ball's favorite book recommendations of all time. At Shortform, we know books. Our book guides are the best in the world. Learn why.
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The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science
Richard Holmes
4.1
'The Age of Wonder' is Richard Holmes' first major work of biography for a decade. It has been inspired by the scientific ferment that swept through Britain at the end of the 18th century, and which Holmes now radically redefines as 'the revolution of Romantic Science'.
Recommended by Caspar Henderson, Ed Cooke, John Shepherd, and 1 others.
The wonder that Richard Holmes is thinking about in this book was an emergent appreciation of the awesomeness of nature. [source]
Caspar Henderson
Among Holmes’s qualities are is his warmth, his extraordinary depth of knowledge and the fluency in his writing. It’s just a really enjoyable read. [source]
Ed Cooke
Ed Cooke recommended this book in the book "Tools of Titans". [source]
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Wonders and the Order of Nature, 1150-1750
Lorraine Daston, Katharine Park
4.7
A rich exploration of how European naturalists used wonder and wonders (oddities and marvels) to envision and explain the natural world.
Winner of the History of Science Society's Pfizer Prize: "This book is about setting the limits of the natural and the limits of the known, wonders and wonder, from the High Middle Ages through the Enlightenment. A history of wonders as objects of natural inquiry is simultaneously an intellectual history of the orders of nature. A history of wonder as a passion of natural inquiry is simultaneously a history of the evolving collective sensibility of naturalists. Pursued in tandem, these interwoven histories show how the two sides of knowledge, objective order and subjective sensibility, were obverse and reverse of the same coin rather than opposed to one another."―From the Introduction
Wonders and the Order of Nature, 1150–1750 is about the ways in which European naturalists from the High Middle Ages through the Enlightenment used wonder and wonders, the passion and its objects, to envision themselves and the natural world. Monsters, gems that shone in the dark, petrifying springs, celestial apparitions―these were the marvels that adorned romances, puzzled philosophers, lured collectors, and frightened the devout. Drawing on the histories of art, science, philosophy, and literature, Lorraine Daston and Katharine Park explore and explain how wonder and wonders fortified princely power, rewove the texture of scientific experience, and shaped the sensibility of intellectuals. This is a history of the passions of inquiry, of how wonder sometimes inflamed, sometimes dampened curiosity about nature's best-kept secrets. Refracted through the prism of wonders, the order of nature splinters into a spectrum of orders, a tour of possible worlds.
This is a wonderful book by Lorraine Daston and Katharine Park which first got me interested in these questions of curiosity. It looks at questions that have a lot of relevance for science, without at all being a book about science. Rather, it’s a book about the development of thought, and about how our cultural conceptions of certain aspects of thought have evolved. In this case, the real question that they are looking at is in the second part of the title – the order of nature. [source]
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Science and the Secrets of Nature: Books of Secrets in Medieval and Early Modern Culture
William Eamon
4.5
By explaining how to sire multicolored horses, produce nuts without shells, and create an egg the size of a human head, Giambattista Della Porta's Natural Magic (1559) conveys a fascination with tricks and illusions that makes it a work difficult for historians of science to take seriously. Yet, according to William Eamon, it is in the how-to books written by medieval alchemists, magicians, and artisans that modern science has its roots. These compilations of recipes on everything from parlor tricks through medical remedies to wool-dyeing fascinated medieval intellectuals because they promised access to esoteric secrets of nature. In closely examining this rich but little-known source of literature, Eamon reveals that printing technology and popular culture had as great, if not stronger, an impact on early modern science as did the traditional academic disciplines.
This book gives fantastic context for how people have thought about nature as a treasure trove of secrets. It goes back to the question of whether it is acceptable to pursue your curiosity. William Eamon has a very nice section on religious attitudes to curiosity in the Middle Ages, when trying to find out nature’s secrets was very much frowned upon. The book also takes us through to the idea that began to emerge in the middle of the 16th century, of nature as full of secrets that we could decode. [source]
He sets out at the beginning his notion that the history of magic and of experimental science are closely allied. [source]
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The Rosicrucian Enlightenment
Frances Yates
4.4
A history of the role that the occult has played in the formation of modern science and medicine, The Rosicrucian Enlightenment has had a tremendous impact on our understanding of the western esoteric tradition. Beautifully illustrated, it remains one of those rare works of scholarship which the general reader simply cannot afford to ignore.
It always interests and slightly amuses me what Rosicrucianism is today. It’s sort of like the Rotary Club. Whereas in the early 17th century it was an invented cult. Someone published pamphlets anonymously, saying that there was a secret brotherhood – the order of the rosy cross – that existed throughout Europe. Those who are in it know who they are, it said, and it’s time for them to get together and bring about a new order. This was connected to the religious currents of the time and was basically a Protestant idea, seen as an element of the Protestant struggle against Catholic oppression. [source]
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Recommended by Caspar Henderson, Ed Cooke, John Shepherd, and 1 others.
