One Hundred Years of Pressure (eBook)

Alan F. Chalmers is the author of What is this thing called science? (1976, 1982, 1999, 2013) which has been translated into eighteen languages and has been a basic text in philosophy of science for four decades. He is  also the Author of Science and its Fabrication (1990) , The Scientist’s atom and the philosopher’s stone (2009) and over fifty journal articles on the history and philosophy of the physical sciences. His  interests are in the history and philosophy of the physical sciences.Having acquired a PhD in History and Philosophy of Science at the University of London in 1971 he moved to the University of Sydney where he remained employed until my ‘retirement’ in 2000. In the late 1980s Alan set up the Unit for History and Philosophy of Science that has flourished and is flourishing.His retirement has given him more time to devote to his research. He has been able to take advantage of Visiting Fellowships at the Dibner Institute for History of Science and Technology, The Centre for Philosophy of Science, University of Pittsburgh and the Institute for Advanced Study at the University of Durham. On three separate occasions he has been a Visiting Scholar at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, and is two weeks into the third of these as this is written.  

Chapter 1. The theoretical challenge posed for seventeenth century mechanics by fluids.Chapter 2. The background to Simon Stevin’s hydrostatics.Chapter 3. Moving beyond Archimedes: The hydrostatics of Simon StevinChapter 4. Galileo, floating bodies and the balanceChapter 5. Descartes’ engagement with hydrostaticsChapter 6. Pascal on the equilibrium of liquidsChapter 7. Experimenting with, and theorizing about, airChapter 8. Boyle and the concept of pressureChapter 9. Newton’s hydrostatics: Pressure in a continuum, following Boyle, rather than corpuscle pressing on corpuscle, following Descartes.Chapter 10. Reflections on the role of theory and experiment in the emergence of hydrostaticsChapter 11. Reflections on the significance of the history of hydrostatics: What was revolutionary about the scientific revolution?