The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science

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HarperPress, 2008 - 554 pagine

Shortlisted for the BBC Samuel Johnson Prize for Non-Fiction and the Royal Society Prize for Science Books

Richard Holmes, prize-winning biographer of Coleridge and Shelley, explores the scientific ferment that swept across Britain at the end of 18th century in this ground-breaking new biography .

'The Age of Wonder' is Richard Holmes's first major work of biography in over a decade. It has been inspired by the scientific ferment that swept through Britain at the end of the eighteenth century, 'The Age of Wonder' and which Holmes now radically redefines as 'the revolution of Romantic Science'.

The book opens with Joseph Banks, botanist on Captain Cook's first Endeavour voyage, stepping onto a Tahitian beach in 1769, hoping to discover Paradise. Many other voyages of discovery swiftly follow, while Banks, now President of the Royal Society in London, becomes our narrative guide to what truly emerges as an Age of Wonder.

Banks introduces us to the two scientific figures that dominate the book: astronomer William Herschel and chemist Humphry Davy. Herschel's tireless dedication to the stars, assisted (and perhaps rivalled) by his comet-finding sister Caroline, changed forever the public conception of the solar system, the Milky Way galaxy and the meaning of the universe itself. Davy first shocked the scientific community with his near-suicidal gas experiments in Bristol, then went on to save thousands of lives with his Safety Lamp and established British chemistry as the leading professional science in Europe. But at the cost, perhaps, of his own heart.

Holmes proposes a radical vision of science before Darwin, exploring the earliest ideas of deep time and deep space, the creative rivalry with the French scientific establishment, and the startling impact of discovery on great writers and poets such as Mary Shelley, Coleridge, Byron and Keats. With his trademark sense of the human drama, he shows how great ideas and experiments are born out of lonely passion, how scientific discoveries (and errors) are made, how intense relationships are forged and broken by research, and how religious faith and scientific truth collide. The result is breathtaking in its originality, its story-telling energy, and not least, in its intellectual significance.

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Sommario

Joseph Banks in Paradise
1
Herschel on the Moon
60
Balloonists in Heaven
125
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Informazioni sull'autore (2008)

Richard Holmes is the author of the prize-winning and bestselling 'The Age of Wonder', which was shortlisted for the Samuel Johnson Prize and won the Royal Society Prize for Science Books (UK) and the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction (USA). He has written many other books including 'Falling Upwards', an uplifting account of the pioneering generation of balloon aeronauts, which was one of Time Magazine's Top 10 Non-Fiction Books of 2013. His trilogy exploring the Romantic Biographer at work, begun with the classic 'Footsteps', and its companion volume 'Sidetracks', is now completed by 'This Long Pursuit'. His first biography, 'Shelley: The Pursuit', won the Somerset Maugham Prize; 'Coleridge: Early Visions' won the 1989 Whitbread Book of the Year Award; 'Coleridge: Darker Reflections' won the Duff Cooper and the Heinemann Awards; 'Dr Johnson & Mr Savage' won the James Tait Black Prize. He holds honorary doctorates from the Universities of East Anglia, East London and Kingston, and was Professor of Biographical Studies at the University of East Anglia from 2001 to 2007. He is an Honorary Fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge, a Fellow of the British Academy, and was awarded the OBE in 1992. He lives in London and Norfolk with the novelist Rose Tremain.

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