A question-first account of how the sciences became modern, and of what that changed
This collection follows how scientific knowledge, practice, and authority have changed since the seventeenth century. It works through the great episodes — from Copernicus and Galileo to Lavoisier, Darwin, and the remaking of physics and biology in the twentieth century — and through the themes that cut across them: organisation, religion, popularisation, technology, ideology, medicine, war, empire, and gender. Each piece is short and self-contained, takes one bounded question as far as the evidence allows, and leaves you able to judge a historical claim about science by asking what is doing the evidential work.
Coming soon
What the historian of science does with the standard story of the seventeenth century.
What the historian of science does with the standard story of the seventeenth century.
How nineteenth-century physics, geology, and biology acquired the problems we still recognise.
How nineteenth-century physics, geology, and biology acquired the problems we still recognise.
The life sciences organising themselves around cells, heredity, and ecosystems.
The life sciences organising themselves around cells, heredity, and ecosystems.
Twentieth-century instruments and methods remaking the map of the sciences.
Twentieth-century instruments and methods remaking the map of the sciences.
Cosmology and the human sciences: the two ends at which scientific self-confidence was tested.
Cosmology and the human sciences: the two ends at which scientific self-confidence was tested.
How scientific authority is organised, argued with, and communicated.
How scientific authority is organised, argued with, and communicated.
Industry, ideology, and medicine: the three places scientific knowledge is put to work.
Industry, ideology, and medicine: the three places scientific knowledge is put to work.
Who gets to do science, whose knowledge counts, and where the field now stands.
Who gets to do science, whose knowledge counts, and where the field now stands.
“History of science written as an argument to follow, not a pantheon to admire.”
The collection takes the episodes everyone half-knows and asks what the evidence actually carries, then widens out to the institutions, beliefs, and interests that shaped which claims survived. Short pieces, sharp questions, and no padding. A reader who works through it will stop taking the tidied story of discovery on trust.
Nano College takes the standard university textbook for a course and turns it into short, self-contained pieces you can actually finish. We keep the ground the textbook covers and the rigour it insists on; what we leave out is the padding that only exists to fill a semester.