书名：The Clockwork Universe: Isaac Newton, the Royal Society, and the Birth of the Modern World机械宇宙：艾萨克·牛顿、皇家学会与现代世界的诞生

作者：Edward Dolnick
出版社名称：Harper Perennial
出版时间：2012
语种：英文
ISBN：9780061719523
商品尺寸：13.5 x 2.4 x 20.3 cm
包装：平装
页数：416
The Clockwork Universe: Isaac Newton, the Royal Society, and the Birth of the Modern World《机械宇宙：艾萨克·牛顿、皇家学会与现代世界的诞生》是一本想了解科学史的人不能不读的难得佳作。我们可以通过作者通俗而不失生动的叙事，认识那个天才成群结队的时代，认识科学与现代世界的关联，认识人类世界的科学史。这是历史上首度透过科学社群的集体力量寻找描述宇宙的简洁的数学形式。作者认为，他们努力的成果，永远改变了人看待自己和自身地位的方式。本书结合历史和科学，描绘一幅引人入胜的科学家群像，他们所揭示的答案在今日仍旧是我们理解世界的关键。

精彩书评：
“多尼克入木三分地刻画了那个时代的天才的形象，他们为有趣的书写提供了充分的材料来源……他以能够把握鲜活细节的独到眼光，辅之以对历史的再创造及对所选主题的热爱……笔下人物有血有肉，是一部引人入胜、增广见闻的好书。” ──《出版家周刊》

“多尼克关于科学革命时代历史的流畅书写，讲述了诸多关于社会变革之时的关键人物与事件的有趣故事。” ──《夏洛特观察家报》

“一部生动描述早期科学史的著作……笔调幽默、布局合理、精彩纷呈。” ——《科克斯书评》
From New York Timesbestselling author Edward Dolnick, the true story of a pivotal moment in modern history when a group of strange, tormented geniuses—Isaac Newton chief among them—invented science and remade our understanding of the world.
At a time when the world was falling apart— in an age of religious wars, plague, and the Great Fire of London—a group of men looked around them and saw a world of perfect order. Chaotic as it looked, these earliest scientists declared, the universe was in fact an intricate and perfectly regulated clockwork. This was the tail-end of Shakespeare’s century, and these were brilliant, ambitious, confused, conflicted men. They believed in angels and alchemy and the devil, and they believed that the universe followed precise, mathematical laws. This is the story of the bewildered geniuses who made the modern world.

Review
“Dolnick’s book is lively and the characters are vivid.”  — New York Times Book Review
“A character-rich, historical narrative.”  — Wall Street Journal
“Edward Dolnick’s smoothly written history of the scientific revolution tells the stories of the key players and events that transformed society.”  — Charlotte Observer
“An engrossing read.”  — Library Journal
“A lively account of early science.... Colorful, entertainingly written and nicely paced.”  — Kirkus Reviews
“[Dolnick] offers penetrating portraits of the geniuses of the day... who offer fertile ground for entertaining writing. [He] has an eye for vivid details in aid of historical recreation, and an affection for his subjects... [An] informative read.”  — Publishers Weekly

17世纪被历史学家称为“天才的时代”，但它同时也是一个骚动的年代。尽管自然与超自然仍然密不可分，疾病是被认为是上帝降下的惩罚，天文学和占星术也并未分家，但是人们也在这个莎士比亚世纪的尾声开始梦想秩序完美的世界。
伽利略、哈雷、开普勒、牛顿、莱布尼茨、笛卡尔……当17世纪晚期绝大多数人仅看到分崩离析的世界时，世界在这群早期科学家眼中却有着完美的秩序。这群人是当时世界上绝顶聪明的人，他们笃信宗教，他们试图通过自身的不懈努力解读上帝的心意，并以此来认清楚这个世界。他们宣称，宇宙在表面的混乱下，其实像是结构复杂并运行完美的机械时钟。为此，他们大胆地进行科学实验验证事物的性质，透过望远镜向外观看探索广阔的宇宙，使用显微镜观察无尽向内探索微小的世界。他们处理了希腊人无法处理的运动问题，从伽利略一路到牛顿，他们启动按钮，让希腊人的静态的世界动了起来；研究了变化中的数学，发现运动定律。他们还探索无限的概念，研究无限大和无限小，发明微积分。尽管他们是带着宗教信仰，带着解读上帝旨意的目的去做着些事，并且他们的观念制造也充满了对立，但是他们的成果为现代科学奠定了基础，也促成现代世界的诞生。

爱德华·多尼克，美国作家，曾任《波士顿环球报》科学专栏作家。文章散见《大西洋月刊》《纽约时报杂志》《华盛顿邮报》等，著有《救援艺术家》《伪画家的技能》等书，其中《救援艺术家》一书获得2006年爱伦坡奖（犯罪实录类）。对于写作《机械宇宙》一书，具有麻省理工学院数学硕士学位的他形容自己“再次回到自己的根源”。
Edward Dolnick is the author of Down the Great Unknown, The Forger’s Spell, and the Edgar Award-winning The Rescue Artist. A former chief science writer at the Boston Globe, he lives with his wife near Washington, D.C.
Few ages could have seemed less likely than the late 1600s to start men dreaming of a world of perfect order. Historians would later talk of the Age of Genius,” but the Age of Tumult would have been just as fitting. In the tail end of Shakespeare’s century, the natural and the supernatural still twined around one another. Disease was a punishment ordained by God. As roomy had not yet broken free from astrology, and the sky was filled with omens.

The only man-made light came from flickering flames and sputtering lanterns. Unless the moon was out, nights were dark and dangerous. Thieves and muggers prowled the streets— the first police forces lay far in the future—and brave souls who ventured outdoors carried their own lanterns or hired a linkboy to light the way with a torch made from a hunk of fat soaked rope. The murder rate was five times as high as it is today.
Even in midday, dries were murky and grimy. Coal smoke left a sooty Crust or Fur’ on all it touched. London was one of the world’s great cities and a center of the new learning, but it was, in one historian’s words, a stinking, muddy, filch-bespattered metropolis. Huge piles inhuman waste blocked city streets, and butchers added heaps of the sole and filth of their Slaughter houses to the cowering mounds.
Ignorance made matters worse. The same barges that brought vegetables to the city from farms in the countryside returned laden with human sewage. to fertilize the fields. When Shakespeare and his allow investors built the Globe Theatre in 1599, the splendid new building held at least two thousand people but was constructed without a single toilet. Well over a century later, hygiene had scarcely improved. Art about the time of Louis XIV’s death in 1715, a new rule was put in place requiring that the corridors in the palace at Versailles be cleaned of ices once a week.
No one bathed, from kings to peasants. The poor had no choice, and the wealthy had no desire.
 (Doctors explained that water opened the pores to infection and plague. A coat of grease and grime sealed disease away) Worms, fleas, lice, and bedbugs were near-universal afflictions. Science would soon revolutionize the world, but the minds that made the modern world were yoked to itchy, smelly, dirty bodies.