Books by I. Bernard Cohen
The Triumph of Numbers: How Counting Shaped Modern Life
From the pyramids to mortality tables, Galileo to Florence Nightingale, a vibrant history of numbers and the birth of statistics. The great historian of science I. B. Cohen explores how numbers have come to assume a leading role in science, in the operations and structure of government, in marketing, and in many other aspects of daily life. Consulting and collecting numbers has been a feature of human affairs since antiquity―taxes, head counts for military service―but not until the Scientific Revolution in the twelfth century did social numbers such as births, deaths, and marriages begin to be analyzed. Cohen shines a new light on familiar figures such as Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, and Charles Dickens; and he reveals Florence Nightingale to be a passionate statistician. Cohen has left us with an engaging and accessible history of numbers, an appreciation of the essential nature of statistics.
Copies
No copies available.
The Principia Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy
by I. Bernard Cohen, Isaac Newton
In his monumental 1687 work Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica, known familiarly as the Principia, Isaac Newton laid out in mathematical terms the principles of time, force, and motion that have guided the development of modern physical science. Even after more than three centuries and the revolutions of Einsteinian relativity and quantum mechanics, Newtonian physics continues to account for many of the phenomena of the observed world, and Newtonian celestial dynamics is used to determine the orbits of our space vehicles.
This completely new translation, the first in 270 years, is based on the third (1726) edition, the final revised version approved by Newton; it includes extracts from the earlier editions, corrects errors found in earlier versions, and replaces archaic English with contemporary prose and up-to-date mathematical forms.
Newton's principles describe acceleration, deceleration, and inertial movement; fluid dynamics; and the motions of the earth, moon, planets, and comets. A great work in itself, the Principia also revolutionized the methods of scientific investigation. It set forth the fundamental three laws of motion and the law of universal gravity, the physical principles that account for the Copernican system of the world as emended by Kepler, thus effectively ending controversy concerning the Copernican planetary system.
The illuminating Guide to the Principia by I. Bernard Cohen, along with his and Anne Whitman's translation, will make this preeminent work truly accessible for today's scientists, scholars, and students.
Copies
No copies available.
Revolution in Science
Only a scholar as rich in learning as I. Bernard Cohen could do justice to a theme so subtle and yet so grand. Spanning five centuries and virtually all of scientific endeavor, Revolution in Science traces the nuances that differentiate both scientific revolutions and human perceptions of them, weaving threads of detail from physics, mathematics, behaviorism, Freud, atomic physics, and even plate tectonics and molecular biology, into the larger fabric of intellectual history.
How did “revolution,” a term from the physical sciences, meaning a turning again and implying permanence and recurrence―the cyclical succession of the seasons, the “revolutions” of the planets in their orbits―become transformed into an expression for radical change in political and socioeconomic affairs, then become appropriated once again to the sciences?
How have political revolutions―French, American, Bolshevik―and such intellectual forces as Darwinism further modified the concept, from revolution in science as a dramatic break with the past to the idea that science progresses by the slow accumulation of knowledge? And what does each transformation in each historical period tell us about the deep conceptual changes in our image of the scientist and scientific activity?
Cohen’s exploration seeks to uncover nothing less than the nature of all scientific revolutions, the stages by which they occur, their time scale, specific criteria for determining whether or not there has been a revolution, and the creative factors in producing a revolutionary new idea. His book is a probing analysis of the history of an idea and one of the most impressive surveys of the history of science ever undertaken.
Copies
No copies available.
Opticks: Or a Treatise of the Reflections, Refractions, Inflections & Colours of Light-Based on the Fourth Edition London, 1730
by Albert Einstein, I. Bernard Cohen, Sir Isaac Newton, Sir Edmund Whittaker
"Recommended to all scientists." — Journal of Royal Naval Scientific Service
"The publishers do us a service by issuing this reprint." — The Institute of Physics
"An underpinning for the entire edifice of physics." — Scientific American
A comprehensive survey of eighteenth-century knowledge about all aspects of light, Opticks also offers countless scientific insights by its distinguished author. One of the most readable of all the great classics of physical science, this volume will impress readers with its surprisingly modern perspectives.
In language that lay readers can easily follow, Sir Isaac Newton describes his famous experiments with spectroscopy and colors, lenses, and the reflection and diffraction of light. Book I contains his fundamental experiments with the spectrum, Book II deals with the ring phenomena, and Book III covers diffraction. The work concludes with "Queries" — speculations concerning light and gravitation. Opticks is introduced with a Foreword by Albert Einstein.
Copies
No copies available.