Author: Colin Alistair RonanPublisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages :
Book Description
The Shorter Science and Civilisation in China: Volume 5
Author: Joseph NeedhamPublisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521467735
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 388
Book Description
This fifth volume abridgement of Joseph Needham's monumental work is concerned with the staggering civil engineering feats made in early and medieval China.
Author: Joseph NeedhamScience in Traditional China
Author: Joseph NeedhamPublisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 9780674794399
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 148
Book Description
The world's preeminent authority on Chinese science explores the philosophy, social structure, arts, crafts, and even military strategies that form our understanding of Chinese science, making instructive comparisons along the way to similar elements of Indian, Hellenistic, and Arabic cultures. A major portion of the book concentrates on Taoist alchemy that led not only to the invention of gunpowder and firearms, but also, through the search for macrobiotic life-elixirs, to the rise of modern medical chemistry.
Author: Joseph NeedhamThe Shorter Science and Civilisation in China:
Author: Colin A. RonanPublisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521338738
Category : Technology & Engineering
Languages : en
Pages : 352
Book Description
Digesting the main sections of Volume IV of Dr. Needham's magnum opus, this book is concerned with the immense advances made in early and medieval China in mechanical engineering. It discusses in simple but eminently readable terms the status of engineers, their tools and materials, then basic mechanical principles, followed by machinery powered by animals, man and even by steam, vehicles for land transport, six centuries of hidden clockwork, windmills and aeronautics. Since China was far ahead of the West in ancient and medieval times, this volume helps make clear the immense debt owed by Western civilization to the Chinese. Such debts included the important mechanical principles of transforming rotary motion to a to-and-fro motion of a crank and vice-versa. They invented the first efficient harness for horses and the first mechanical clocks.
The Shorter Science and Civilisation in China: Volume 1
Author: Colin A. RonanPublisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521292863
Category : Technology & Engineering
Languages : en
Pages : 0
Book Description
Joseph Needham's Science and Civilisation in China is a monumental piece of scholarship which breaks new ground in presenting to the Western reader a detailed and coherent account of the development of science, technology and medicine in China from the earliest times until the advent of the Jesuits and the beginnings of modern science in the late seventeenth century. It is a vast work, necessarily more suited to the scholar and research worker than the general reader. This paperback version, abridged and re-written by Colin Ronan, makes this extremely important study accessible to a wider public. The present book covers the material treated in volumes I and II of Dr Needham's original work. The reader is introduced to the country of China, its history, geography and language, and an account is given of how scientific knowledge travelled between China and Europe. The major part of the book is then devoted to the history of scientific thought in China itself. Beginning with ancient times, it describes the milieu in which arose the schools of the Confucians, Taoists, Mohists, Logicians and Legalists. We are thus brought on to the fundamental ideas which dominated scientific thinking in the Chinese Middle Ages, to the doctrines of the Two Forces (Yin and Yang) and the Five Elements (wu hsing), to the impact of the sceptical tradition and Buddhist and Neo-Confucian thought.
Author: Science and Civilisation in China: Volume 5, Chemistry and Chemical Technology, Part 5, Spagyrical Discovery and Invention: Physiological Alchemy
Author: Joseph NeedhamPublisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521085748
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 616
Book Description
The fifth volume of Dr Needham's immense undertaking, like the fourth, is subdivided into parts for ease of assimilation and presentation, each part bound and published separately. The volume as a whole covers the subjects of alchemy, early chemistry, and chemical technology (which includes military invention, especially gunpowder and rockets; paper and printing; textiles; mining and metallurgy; the salt industry; and ceramics).
On Their Own Terms
Author: Benjamin A. ElmanPublisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674036476
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 606
Book Description
In On Their Own Terms, Benjamin A. Elman offers a much-needed synthesis of early Chinese science during the Jesuit period (1600-1800) and the modern sciences as they evolved in China under Protestant influence (1840s-1900). By 1600 Europe was ahead of Asia in producing basic machines, such as clocks, levers, and pulleys, that would be necessary for the mechanization of agriculture and industry. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Elman shows, Europeans still sought from the Chinese their secrets of producing silk, fine textiles, and porcelain, as well as large-scale tea cultivation. Chinese literati borrowed in turn new algebraic notations of Hindu-Arabic origin, Tychonic cosmology, Euclidian geometry, and various computational advances. Since the middle of the nineteenth century, imperial reformers, early Republicans, Guomindang party cadres, and Chinese Communists have all prioritized science and technology. In this book, Elman gives a nuanced account of the ways in which native Chinese science evolved over four centuries, under the influence of both Jesuit and Protestant missionaries. In the end, he argues, the Chinese produced modern science on their own terms.
