Books

Quantifying Music. The Science of Music at the First Stage of the Scientific Revolution, 1580-1650.
Dordrecht: Reidel, 1984. xvii + 308 p. ISBN: 90.277.1637.4. Western Ontario Series, Vol. 23.

The Scientific Revolution. A Historiographical Inquiry.
Chicago & London: University of Chicago Press, 1994. xviii + 662 p. ISBN cloth: 0.226.11279.9.; paperback: 0.226.11280.2.
A translation into Chinese, by Dr. Zhang Butian, appeared in 2012 with Hunan Science and Technology Press. In July 2012 I have added this postscript. There I first survey all fourteen books on the Scientific Revolution that have appeared since. Next, I explain how a large variety of insights gathered in my own The Scientific Revolution helped me to the thorough-going reconceptualization of the Scientific Revolution that marks the next book that I published:

How Modern Science Came Into the World. Four Civilizations, One 17th Century Breakthrough. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2010. xl + 784 p., cloth, ISBN 978.90.8964.239.4; available in Open Access.
Quotations: All passages quoted in the book (save those in English or in non-Western languages) are rendered in the original on pdf.
Shorter, widely accessible version. The book listed below is a short version of the argument, aimed at a broad academic audience.

The Rise of Modern Science Explained. A Comparative History. Cambridge UP, 2015: 296p.; ISBN hardback: 978.1.107.12006.8; ISBN paperback 978.1.107.54560.1.

I originally wrote this shorter, more widely accessible version of How Modern Science Came Into The World in Dutch, entitled De herschepping van de wereld. Het ontstaan van de moderne natuurwetenschap verklaard (literally ‘The Recreation of the World. The Rise of Modern Science Explained’), this book sold over 12,000 copies, and earned me the Dutch Eureka prize for the best 2007 book to present science and scholarship to a general public. It has also been published in German: Die zweite Erschaffung der Welt. Wie die moderne Naturwissenschaft entstand. Frankfurt a/M: Campus Verlag, 2010, and in Chinese with Hunan Science and Technology Press (translated by Dr. Zhang Butian).

Isaac Newton en het ware weten. Amsterdam: Bert Bakker (Prometheus): 2010. 267 p. ISBN 978.90.351.3454.6.
This book (in Dutch; no English translation yet made) offers a succinct overview of all of Newton’s work, rendered in ways accessible to a wide academic readership. Its leading theme is the contrast between Newton’s effort to attain certainty and the more customary, hypothetical and probabilistic approach taken by, notably, Newton’s closest colleagues, Robert Hooke and Christiaan Huygens. Much in the book draws on the Newton chapter and other Newton passages in How Modern Science Came Into the World, supplemented with the main facts of Newton’s life and career.

‘Unsettling Knowledge. Kepler to Einstein in Eleven Written Portraits’.
This is the English translation, ready for publication, of Het knagende weten — a book of mine in Dutch that came out in 2016 and that contains written portraits of eleven significant thinkers in the field of tension between their science and their religion. This lecture gives a good idea of what ‘Unsettling Knowledge’ is about, with the Table of Contents at the end.