Before Captain Cook's three voyages, to Europeans the globe was uncertain and dangerous; after, it was comprehensible and ordered. Written as a conceptual field

The dramatic human story of an epic scientific quest and of one man's forty-year obsession to find a solution to the thorniest scientific dilemma of the day--"t

Empires of Knowledge charts the emergence of different kinds of scientific networks – local and long-distance, informal and institutional, religious and secul

"In Galison's telling of science, the meters and wires and epoxy and solder come alive as characters, along with physicists, engineers, technicians and others .