History of Science from Descartes and Newton to Darwin and Einstein

(Not open to students who have taken HIE 301.) This course examines the nature and significance of scientific thinking in the work of Descartes, Leibnitz, and Newton; the conflicts between science and religion in the seventeenth century; materialism's penetration of biology from physics; the revolution in chemistry associated with Priestley and Lavoisier; the interface between science and the industrial revolution; the work of the French biologist Claude Bernard, illustrating the development of biology and experimental medicine; the startling work of Charles Darwin; and twentieth-century topics, such as field and atomic theory, relativity, and quantum theory and their important philosophical implications.