Jimena Canales: A Tenth of a Second: A History (2010)

“In the late fifteenth century, clocks acquired minute hands. A century later, second hands appeared. But it wasn’t until the 1850s that instruments could recognize a tenth of a second, and, once they did, the impact on modern science and society was profound. Revealing the history behind this infinitesimal interval, A Tenth of a Second sheds new light on modernity and illuminates the work of important thinkers of the last two centuries.

Tracing debates about the nature of time, causality, and free will, as well as the introduction of modern technologies—telegraphy, photography, cinematography—Jimena Canales locates the reverberations of this “perceptual moment” throughout culture. Once scientists associated the tenth of a second with the speed of thought, they developed reaction time experiments with lasting implications for experimental psychology, physiology, and optics. Astronomers and physicists struggled to control the profound consequences of results that were a tenth of a second off. And references to the interval were part of a general inquiry into time, consciousness, and sensory experience that involved rethinking the contributions of Descartes and Kant.

Considering its impact on much longer time periods and featuring appearances by Henri Bergson, Walter Benjamin, and Albert Einstein, among others, A Tenth of a Second is ultimately an important contribution to history and a novel perspective on modernity.”

Publisher University of Chicago Press, 2010
ISBN 0226093182, 9780226093185
288 pages

review (Val Dusek, Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews)

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George Saliba: Islamic Science and the Making of the European Renaissance (2007)

The Islamic scientific tradition has been described many times in accounts of Islamic civilization and general histories of science, with most authors tracing its beginnings to the appropriation of ideas from other ancient civilizations—the Greeks in particular. In this thought-provoking and original book, George Saliba argues that, contrary to the generally accepted view, the foundations of Islamic scientific thought were laid well before Greek sources were formally translated into Arabic in the ninth century. Drawing on an account by the tenth-century intellectual historian Ibn al-Nadīm that is ignored by most modern scholars, Saliba suggests that early translations from mainly Persian and Greek sources outlining elementary scientific ideas for the use of government departments were the impetus for the development of the Islamic scientific tradition. He argues further that there was an organic relationship between the Islamic scientific thought that developed in later centuries and the science that came into being in Europe during the Renaissance.

Saliba outlines the conventional accounts of Islamic science, then discusses their shortcomings and proposes an alternate narrative. Using astronomy as a template for understanding the progress of science in Islamic civilization, Saliba demonstrates the originality of Islamic scientific thought. He details the innovations (including new mathematical tools) made by the Islamic astronomers from the thirteenth to sixteenth centuries, and offers evidence that Copernicus could have known of and drawn on their work. Rather than viewing the rise and fall of Islamic science from the often-narrated perspectives of politics and religion, Saliba focuses on the scientific production itself and the complex social, economic, and intellectual conditions that made it possible.

Publisher MIT Press, 2007
Transformations: Studies in the History of Science and Technology series
ISBN 0262195577, 9780262195577
315 pages

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Sluneční hodiny na pevných stanovištích (2005) [Czech]

Sluneční hodiny jsou pozoruhodné kulturní památky. Snoubí se v nich matematika, geometrie, astronomie s uměním, architekturou či řemeslem. Bývají krásnou ozdobou budov a veřejných prostranství, připomínkou spojení našeho života se Sluncem, jsou i vynikající učební pomůckou.
V knize najdete katalog 2339 slunečních hodin na pevných stanovištích v Čechách, na Moravě, ve Slezsku a na Slovensku. Jedná se o první soupis svého druhu a rozsahu. Dozvíte se o principech fungování slunečních hodin, jejich stavbě a obnově, gnómonických zajímavostech a nejhezčích (ne nutně nejznámějších) slunečních hodinách na celém zpracovaném území.Pro návštěvníky Prahy, domácí i zahraniční, je připojen námět na vycházku za pražskými slunečními hodinami.

Sluneční hodiny na pevných stanovištích. Čechy, Morava, Slezsko a Slovensko
Edited by Miroslav Brož, Miloš Nosek, Jan Trebichavský, Drahomíra Pecinová
Publisher: Academia, Prague, 2005
ISBN 80-200-1204-4
EAN 9788020012043
404 pages

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