Reckoning with Matter

Calculating Machines, Innovation, and Thinking about Thinking from Pascal to Babbage

Matthew L. Jones (Autor)

Buch | Hardcover

336 Seiten

2016
University of Chicago Press (Verlag)
978-0-226-41146-0 (ISBN)

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From Blaise Pascal in the 1600s to Charles Babbage in the first half of the nineteenth century, inventors struggled to create the first calculating machines. All failed but that doesn't mean we can't learn from the trail of ideas, correspondence, machines, and arguments they left behind. In Reckoning with Matter, Matthew Jones draws on the remarkably extensive and well-preserved records of the quest to explore the concrete processes involved in imagining, elaborating, testing, and building calculating machines. He explores the writings of philosophers, engineers, and craftspeople, showing how they thought about technical novelty, their distinctive areas of expertise, and ways they could coordinate their efforts, to argue that the conceptions of creativity and making they exhibited are often more incisive and more honest than those that dominate our current legal, political, and aesthetic culture.

Matthew L. Jones is the James R. Barker Professor of Contemporary Civilization in the Department of History at Columbia University and the author of The Good Life in the Scientific Revolution,

Erscheinungsdatum	11.11.2016
Sprache	englisch
Maße	16 x 23 mm
Gewicht	595 g
Themenwelt	Geisteswissenschaften ► Geschichte ► Regional- / Ländergeschichte
	Geschichte ► Teilgebiete der Geschichte ► Technikgeschichte
	Mathematik / Informatik ► Informatik
	Mathematik / Informatik ► Mathematik
	Technik
ISBN-10	0-226-41146-X / 022641146X
ISBN-13	978-0-226-41146-0 / 9780226411460
Zustand	Neuware