Measuring Shadows
eBook - PDF

Measuring Shadows

Kepler’s Optics of Invisibility

  1. English
  2. PDF
  3. Available on iOS & Android
eBook - PDF

Measuring Shadows

Kepler’s Optics of Invisibility

Book details
Table of contents
Citations

About This Book

In Measuring Shadows, Raz Chen-Morris demonstrates that a close study of Kepler's Optics is essential to understanding his astronomical work and his scientific epistemology. He explores Kepler's radical break from scientific and epistemological traditions and shows how the seventeenth-century astronomer posited new ways to view scientific truth and knowledge. Chen-Morris reveals how Kepler's ideas about the formation of images on the retina and the geometrics of the camera obscura, as well as his astronomical observations, advanced the argument that physical reality could only be described through artificially produced shadows, reflections, and refractions.

Breaking from medieval and Renaissance traditions that insisted upon direct sensory perception, Kepler advocated for instruments as mediators between the eye and physical reality, and for mathematical language to describe motion. It was only through this kind of knowledge, he argued, that observation could produce certainty about the heavens. Not only was this conception of visibility crucial to advancing the early modern understanding of vision and the retina, but it affected how people during that period approached and understood the world around them.

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Information

Publisher
Penn State University Press
Year
2016
ISBN
9780271077338
Topic
History
Subtopic
European History
Index
History

Table of contents

  1. COVER Front
  2. Copyright Page
  3. Table of Contents
  4. List of Illustrations
  5. Acknowledgments
  6. Introduction
  7. Chapter 1: The New Optical Narrative: Light, Camera Obscura, and the Astronomer’s Wings
  8. Chapter 2: "Seeing with My Own Eyes": Introducing the New Foundations of Scientific Knowledge
  9. Chapter 3: The Content of Kepler's Visual Language: Abstraction, Representation, and Recognition
  10. Chapter 4: "Non Tanquam Pictor, Sed Tanquam Mathematicus": Kepler’s Pictures and the Art of Painting
  11. Chapter 5: Reading the Book of Nature: Allegories, Emblems, and Geometrical Diagrams
  12. Chapter 6: Nothing and the Ends of Renaissance Science
  13. Postscript: “Making Nothing All”
  14. Notes
  15. Bibliography
  16. Index
  17. COVER Back