ENGLISH

A World on Fire: A Heretic, an Aristocrat, and the Race to Discover Oxygen

By Joe Jackson

Book information

Publisher
Penguin Publishing Group
Year
2007
ISBN
9781440695971, 2004065103
Language
english
Format
EPUB
Filesize
489 kB (500947 bytes)
Pages
\0
Time added
2022-09-29 18:25:24
BIO015000Biography & AutobiographyHIS037060HistoryNonfictionSCI034000Science

Description

Like Charles Seife’s Zero and Dava Sobel’s Longitude, this passionate intellectual history is the story of the intersection of science and the human, in this case the rivals who discovered oxygen in the late 1700s. That breakthrough changed the world as radically as those of Newton and Darwin but was at first eclipsed by revolution and reaction. In chronicling the triumph and ruin of the English freethinker Joseph Priestley and the French nobleman Antoine Lavoisier—the former exiled, the latter executed on the guillotine—A World on Fire illustrates the perilous place of science in an age of unreason.

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