I recently realized that I think the stuff I already know about the history of science, math, etc., is really inherently interesting and fascinating to me, but that I've never actually thought about going out of my way to learn more on the subject. Does anybody on here have one really good book on the subject to recommend? I've already read Science and the Enlightenment by Hankins.
I second the recommendation of The Copernican Revolution, and suggest another book on the same topic: Arthur Koestler's The Sleepwalkers.
Koestler was a great novelist (his best known novel, Darkness at Noon, rivals 1984 in its portrayal of totalitarian thought) and a brilliant, eclectic and sometimes bizarre thinker. The Sleepwalkers is a grand history of astronomy and cosmology from ancient times to Newton, with the bulk of the focus on Copernicus, Kepler and Galileo.
Pros: Fascinating and very detailed biographical information on these three figures (an...
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