Philosophy of Science

The Galileo Project is a source of information on the life and work of Galileo Galilei (1564-1642). Our aim is to provide hypertextual information about Galileo and the science of his time to viewers of all ages and levels of expertise. What you read and see here is a beginning -- we will continue to add and update information as it becomes available. We solicit contributions from our colleagues in the history of science and comments on how we can improve the project from everyone, particularly suggestions on how to make this tool more useful in primary and secondary education.

This project is currently supported by the Office of the Vice President of Computing of Rice University. The initial stages of the project were made possible by a grant from the Council on Library Resources to Fondren Library.

The United Nations has declared 2001 INTERNATIONAL YEAR OF DIALOGUE AMONG CIVILIZATIONS.

This site is dedicated to increasing awareness of the way modern science grew through the dialogue of civilizations, and the contribution dialogue can make to promoting the growth of science in the future.

Although the dominant view in the past has been that the historical roots of modern science only lie within Europe increasing evidence accumulated over the last fifty years reveals the need for a more dialogical approach to the history of science. Understanding the role played by civilizational dialogue in the growth of modern science would also enable us to take more seriously the emerging realization among many leading thinkers that premodern traditions of science contain reservoirs of knowledge urgently needed to deal with serious problems - like environmental and health concerns -that confront the global community.

The Claude Shannon project seeks to preserve the memory of the man whose mathematical theories lay the groundwork for the digital communication technology underlying the Internet. Shannon’s ideas, initially applied to telephone switching systems and early computing, proved tremendously useful in other scientific fields including genetics, encryption, and quantum physics. Shannon, dubbed the father of modern information theory, also applied his theoretical work to one of his favorite hobbies, juggling. His famous juggling machines illustrated his creativity, inveterate tinkering and great powers of invention. If Shannon or his work has influenced you either professionally or personally, please contribute your experiences and recollections to Echo’s permanent digital archive.

Most Darwin texts on the internet exclude essential bibliographical information such as edition, publisher, place of publication, etc. Page numbers are nowhere to be seen. These factors vastly reduce the usefulness of these texts as they cannot be easily cited. It is impossible to know if one is reading a first or sixth edition. An example are the many online 'first editions' of Darwin's Origin of Species. Often these cannot be correct as the text contains the phrase 'survival of the fittest'—famously coined by Herbert Spencer and first included in the 5th edition of 1869. Many other online copies of the Origin purport to be the first edition yet contain the 'Historical Sketch', first found in Britain in the 3rd edition of 1861.

Tutankhamun: Anatomy of an Excavation is ambitious in its scope but simple in its aims: to make the complete records of Howard Carter's excavation of the tomb of Tutankhamun available on these web pages. It is astonishing, but no longer acceptable, that some eighty years and thousands of articles, hundreds of books, and dozens of exhibitions after the discovery of the tomb, this most famous event in the history of Egyptian archaeology has not yet been fully published.

The VL is the oldest catalog of the web, started by Tim Berners-Lee, the creator of html and the web itself. Unlike commercial catalogs, it is run by a loose confederation of volunteers, who compile pages of key links for particular areas in which they are expert; even though it isn't the biggest index of the web, the VL pages are widely recognised as being amongst the highest-quality guides to particular sections of the web.

Although these achievements are fundamental to modern mathematics and physics, it is less well known that Newton himself placed great value on his private researches into theology and alchemy. Interest in the wealth of surviving manuscript material in these areas has increased dramatically in recent years, and the Newton Project was formed in 1998 to make all Newton's texts, both 'scientific' and 'non-scientific' (including those papers relevant to his three decades service at the Royal Mint), available to a broad readership in a form that is at once scholarly and accessible. The Project aims to create a printed edition of Newton's theological, alchemical and administrative writings and an electronic edition of all his writings, including his correspondence.

This is a brief outline of the development of string theory, the details of which will eventually fill many large volumes written by many people directly and indirectly involved in this rich and fascinating story.

Research Aids for the Nineteenth Century

Nearly 10'000 links to books on philosophy, science, classics, literature, history, economics, etc. Multilingual. Several Search programs on author, title, language, words, etc.