Book contents
- Frontmatter
- 1 Introduction: The Age of the New
- Part I The New Nature
- Part II Personae and Sites of Natural Knowledge
- Part III Dividing the Study of Nature
- 17 Natural Philosophy
- 18 Medicine
- 19 Natural History
- 20 Cosmography
- 21 From Alchemy to “Chymistry”
- 22 Magic
- 23 Astrology
- 24 Astronomy
- 25 Acoustics and Optics
- 26 Mechanics
- 27 The Mechanical Arts
- 28 Pure Mathematics
- Part IV Cultural Meanings of Natural Knowledge
- Index
- References
25 - Acoustics and Optics
from Part III - Dividing the Study of Nature
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 March 2008
Book contents
- Frontmatter
- 1 Introduction: The Age of the New
- Part I The New Nature
- Part II Personae and Sites of Natural Knowledge
- Part III Dividing the Study of Nature
- 17 Natural Philosophy
- 18 Medicine
- 19 Natural History
- 20 Cosmography
- 21 From Alchemy to “Chymistry”
- 22 Magic
- 23 Astrology
- 24 Astronomy
- 25 Acoustics and Optics
- 26 Mechanics
- 27 The Mechanical Arts
- 28 Pure Mathematics
- Part IV Cultural Meanings of Natural Knowledge
- Index
- References
Summary
During the early modern period, music (of which acoustics is an offspring) and optics belonged to the “mixed mathematical” sciences. “Mixed mathematics” refers here to those physical disciplines that could be treated by extensive use of arithmetic or geometric techniques, such as astronomy, mechanics, optics, and music (see Andersen and Bos, Chapter 28, this volume).
The study of sound in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries cannot be properly considered to belong to any single discipline but rather is found at the intersection of several fields, including music theory, mechanics, anatomy, and natural philosophy. Thus, no single mixed mathematician of the sixteenth or the seventeenth century can be properly said to have specialized in acoustics. Among the early modern scholars who contributed to the study of sound were mixed mathematician Giovanni Battista Benedetti (1530–1590), musician Vincenzo Galilei (1520–1591), and natural philosopher Robert Boyle (1627–1691), which gives some idea of the variety of disciplinary approaches. It is nonetheless safe to say that the study of music theory provided the common background on the basis of which further studies on sound phenomena would be undertaken. Moreover, in the area of natural philosophy, the classical treatises De sensu (On the Senses), De audibilibus (On Things Audible), De anima (On the Soul), and the Problemata (Problems), all attributed to Aristotle at the time, contained material pertaining to acoustic phenomena and were well known to sixteenth- and seventeenth-century scholars.
The practitioners involved in the study of sound were socially disparate as well, ranging from the choirmaster of St. Mark’s in Venice, Gioseffo Zarlino (1517–1590); to a schoolteacher in the Netherlands, Isaac Beeckman (1588–1637); to a Minim friar in Paris, Marin Mersenne (1588–1648).
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Cambridge History of Science , pp. 596 - 631Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2006
References
De aspectibus and Witelo’s Perspectiva were printed in Opticae thesaurus, ed. (Basel: Episcopios, 1572).Google Scholar
“The Mathematical Technique in Fermat’s Deduction of the Law of Refraction,” Historia Mathematica, 10 (1983).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Elementa harmonica is in The Harmonics of Aristoxenus, ed. and trans. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1902).Google Scholar
Experimenta crystalli Islandici disdiaclastici, quibus mira et insolita refractio detegitur (Hafniae: Danielis Paulli, 1669).Google Scholar
New Experiments Physico-Mechanicall, Touching the Spring of the Air and Its Effects (Oxford: H. Hall, 1660).Google Scholar
“The De institutione arithmetica and the De institutione musica,” in Boethius: His Life, Thought and Influence, ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981).Google Scholar
Optics after Newton: Theories of Light in Britain and Ireland, 1704–1840 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1983).Google Scholar
, ed., Music and Science in the Age of Galileo; , ed., La musica nella rivoluzione scientifica del Seicento (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1989).Google Scholar
Quantifying Music: The Science of Music at the First Stage of the Scientific Revolution, 1580–1650 (Dordrecht: Reidel, 1984).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
“La refraction de la lumièreetla Dioptrique de Descartes,” in , Démarches originals de Descartes savant, (Paris: J. Vrin, 1982).Google Scholar
Styles of Scientific Thinking in the European Tradition: The History of Argument and Explanation Especially in the Mathematical and Biomedical Sciences and Arts, 3 vols. (London: Duckworth, 1994).Google Scholar
“Science de la nature et theorie musicale chez Isaac Beeckman (1588–1637),” Revue d’histoire des sciences, 38 (1985).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Diversarum speculationum mathematicarum & physicorum liber (Turin: Successors of Nicola Bevilaqua, 1585).Google Scholar
Saggi di naturali esperienze fatte nell’Accademia del Cimento (Florence: Cocchini, 1667).Google Scholar
and , “Entstehung der musikalischen Akustik (1600–1750),” in Geschichte der Musiktheorie, ed. (Hören, Messen and Rechnen in der frühen Neuzeit, Band 6) (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1987).Google Scholar
“Early Vibration Theory: Physics and Music in the XVIIth Century,” Archive for History of Exact Sciences, 14 (1975).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
“Renaissance Music and Experimental Science,” Journal of the History of Ideas, 31 (1970).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sciences and the Secrets of Nature: Books of Secrets in Medieval and Early Modern Culture (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1994).Google Scholar
and , “An Early Critique of Bacon’s Sylva Sylvarum,” Annals of Science, 40 (1983).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
“Benedetti’s Views on Musical Science and Their Background in Venetian Culture,” in Instituto Veneto di Science Lettere edArti, Atti del Convegno Internazionale di Studio “Giovan Battista Benedetti e il suo tempo” (Venezia, 1987) (Venice: Il Istituto, 1987).Google Scholar
Two New Sciences, including Centers of Gravity & Force of Percussion, translated with notes by (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1974).Google Scholar
“La tradizione del mezzo e la Nuova teoria della luce di Leonhard Euler,” Nuncius, 15 (2000).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Luce e visione: Thomas Hobbes e la scienza dell’ottica (Florence: Leo S. Olschki, 1999).Google Scholar
, “Acoustics in the Early Royal Society, 1660–1680,” Notes and Records of the Royal Society of London, 36 (1982).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
, “The Role of Acoustics and Music Theory in the Scientific Work of R. Hooke,” Annals of Science, 37 (1980).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
“Music in Francis Bacon’s Natural Philosophy,” in Francis Bacon: Terminologia, ed. (Rome: Edizioni dell’Ateneo, 1984).Google Scholar
“Some English Theories of Hearing in the Seventeenth Century: Before and after Descartes,” in The Second Sense: Studies in Hearing and Musical Judgement from Antiquity to the Seventeenth Century, ed. , , and (London: Warburg Institute, 1991).Google Scholar
Music, Science, and Natural Magic in Seventeenth Century England (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1999).Google Scholar
, “The Harmonic Roots of Newtonian Science,” in Let Newton Be! A New Perspective on His Life and Work, ed. , , , and (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988).Google Scholar
, “La musica nella filosofia naturale del Seicento in Italia,” Nuncius, 1 (1986).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
“Una matematica media gesuita: la musica di Descartes,” in Christoph Clavius e l’attività scientifica dei gesuiti nell’età di Galileo, ed. (Rome: Bulzoni, 1995).Google Scholar
La Mutation du visible: Essai sur la portée épistémologique des instruments d’optique au XVIIe siècle (Villeneuve d’Ascq: Presses Universitaire du Septentrion, 1999).Google Scholar
Geschichte der Augenheilkunde (Hildesheim: Georg Olms, 1977; orig. publ. 1899 (vol. 1) and 1908 (vol. 2)).Google Scholar
Origins in Acoustics: The Science of Sound from Antiquity to the Age of Newton (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1978).Google Scholar
Great Books of the Western World, 54 vols. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1952).Google Scholar
The Development of Newtonian Optics in England (New York: Science History Publications, 1977).Google Scholar
The Science of Art: Optical Themes in Western Art from Brunelleschi to Seurat (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1990).Google Scholar
“Harmony and Cosmos: Mathematics Serving a Teleogical Understanding of the World,” Physis, nuova ser., 32 (1995).Google Scholar
“Mathematical Versus Experimental Traditions in the Development of Physical Science,” The Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 7 (1976).Google Scholar
and , The Discourse of Light from the Middle Ages to the Enlightenment (Los Angeles: William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, 1985).Google Scholar
“Continuity and Discontinuity in the History of Optics: Kepler and the Medieval Tradition,” History and Technology, 4 (1987).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
“Optics in XVIth Century Italy,” in Novità celesti e crisi del sapere (Florence: Giunti Barbera, 1983).Google Scholar
“The Genesis of Kepler’s Theory of Light: Light Metaphysics from Plotinus to Kepler,” Osiris, 2 (1986).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Theories of Vision from Al-Kindi to Kepler (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976).Google Scholar
, Encyclopedia of the History of Arabic Science, ed. , 3 vols. (London: Routledge, 1996), vol. 2.Google Scholar
, Roger Bacon and the Origins of Perspectiva in the Middle Ages (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996).Google Scholar
The Mathematical Career of Pierre de Fermat, 1601–1665 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1973).Google Scholar
Ad Vitellionem paralipomena: Les Fondements de l’Optique Moderne: Paralipomenes à Vitellion (1604) (Paris: J. Vrin, 1990).Google Scholar
“Gregorie, Descartes, Kepler, and the Law of Refraction,” Archives Internationales d’Histoire des Sciences, 40 (1990).Google Scholar
“Isaac Barrow and the Mathematization of Nature: Theological Voluntarism and the Rise of Geometrical Optics,” Journal of the History of Ideas, 46 (1995).Google Scholar
“Keplerian Illusions: Geometrical Pictures vs. Optical Images in Kepler’s Visual Theory,” Studies in History and Philosophy of Science, 21 (1990).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
and , is given in The Art of Counterpoint: Part Three of Le istitutioni harmoniche (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1968).Google Scholar
and , “Newton and the ‘Pipes of Pan’,” Notes and Records of the Royal Society of London, 21 (1966).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Tuba Stentoro-Phonica, An Instrument of Excellent Use, As well at Sea, as at Land; Invented and variously experimented in the Year 1670 (London: Godbid, 1672).Google Scholar
Pythagoras Musicus: zur Rezeption der pythagoreischen Musiktheorie als quadrivialer Wisenschaft im lateinischen Mittelalter (Bonn: Verlag für Systematische Musikwissenschaft, 1976).Google Scholar
“A New Theory about Light and Colours,” in The Correspondence of Isaac Newton, ed. and , 7 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1959).Google Scholar
“Scientific Empiricism in Musical Thought,” in Seventeenth Century Science and the Arts, ed. (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1961).Google Scholar
Humanism in Italian Renaissance Musical Thought (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1985).Google Scholar
appears in On the Modes: Part Four of Le istitutioni harmoniche (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1983).Google Scholar
, “Was Galileo’s Father an Experimental Scientist?,” in Music and Science in the Age of Galileo, ed. (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1992).Google Scholar
Geschichte der Ohrenheilkunde, 2 vols. (Stuttgart: Enke, 1907–13, repr. Hildesheim: Georg Olms, 1967).Google Scholar
“Jo. Bapt. Benedictus, De intervallis musicis,” Zeitschrift für Musikwissenschaft, 7 (1924–5).Google Scholar
“The Invention of Eyeglasses,” Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences, 11 (1956).Google ScholarPubMed
All Was Light: An Introduction to Newton’s Opticks (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993).Google Scholar
Theories of Light from Descartes to Newton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981).Google Scholar
Newton’s Optical Writings: A Guided Study (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1994).Google Scholar
and , Leviathan and the Air-Pump: Hobbes, Boyle, and the Experimental Life (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1985).Google Scholar
“Kinematic Optics: A Study of the Wave Theory of Light in the Seventeenth Century,” Archive for History of Exact Sciences, 11 (1973).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
“The Optical Lectures and the Foundations of the Theory of Optical Imagery,” in Before Newton: The Life and Times of Isaac Barrow, ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990).Google Scholar
ed., The Optical Papers of Isaac Newton, vol. 1: The Optical Lectures, 1670–1672 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984).Google Scholar
“Descartes’s Theory of Light and Refraction: A Discourse on Method,” Transactions of the American Mathematical Society, 77 (1987).Google Scholar
The Music of the Heavens: Kepler’s Harmonic Astronomy (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1994).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
“The Eye Made ‘Other’: Durer, Kepler, and the Mechanization of Life and Vision,” in Science, Technology, and Culture, in Historical Perspective, ed. , , and (Calgary: University of Calgary Press, 1976).Google Scholar
“Kepler, Tycho, and the ‘Optical Part of Astronomy’: The Genesis of Kepler’s Theory of Pinhole Images,” Archive for History of Exact Sciences, 24 (1981).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
“The Rational Mechanics of Flexible or Elastic Bodies, 1638–1788,” in , Leonhardi Euleri Opera Omnia, ed. , , and , second ser. (Leipzig: B. G. Teubneri, 1911–), vol. 11 (1960).Google Scholar
, “The Theory of Aereal Sound, 1687–1788,” in Leonhardi Euleri Opera Omnia, vol. 13 (1960).Google Scholar
“Galileo and the Telescope,” in Novità celesti e crisi del sapere, ed. (Florence: Giunti Barbera, 1983).Google Scholar
“Leibniz and Language,” in Music, Spirit, and Language in the Renaissance, ed. (London: Variorum Reprints, 1985).Google Scholar
Spiritual and Demonic Magic from Ficino to Campanella (London: Warburg Institute, 1958).Google Scholar
Essays of Natural Experiments made in the Accademia del Cimento (London: Alsop, 1684).Google Scholar
“Dr Wallis’ letter to the publisher, concerning a new musical discovery,” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, 12 (1677–8).Google Scholar
- 2
- Cited by