The Shorter Science and Civilisation in China: Volume 1

The Shorter Science and Civilisation in China: Volume 1 PDF Author: Joseph Needham
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521292863
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 344

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Book Description
Volumes I and II of the major series: China: its language, geography and history ; Chinese philosophy and scientific thought.

The Shorter Science and Civilisation in China: Volume 1

The Shorter Science and Civilisation in China: Volume 1 PDF Author: Joseph Needham
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521292863
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 344

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Book Description
Volumes I and II of the major series: China: its language, geography and history ; Chinese philosophy and scientific thought.

The Shorter Science and Civilisation in China: Volume 5

The Shorter Science and Civilisation in China: Volume 5 PDF Author: Joseph Needham
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521467735
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 388

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Book Description
This fifth volume abridgement of Joseph Needham's monumental work is concerned with the staggering civil engineering feats made in early and medieval China.

Science in Traditional China

Science in Traditional China PDF Author: Joseph Needham
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 9780674794399
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 148

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Book Description
The world's preeminent authority on Chinese science explores the philosophy, social structure, arts, crafts, and even military strategies that form our understanding of Chinese science, making instructive comparisons along the way to similar elements of Indian, Hellenistic, and Arabic cultures. A major portion of the book concentrates on Taoist alchemy that led not only to the invention of gunpowder and firearms, but also, through the search for macrobiotic life-elixirs, to the rise of modern medical chemistry.

Science and Civilisation in China: Volume 5, Chemistry and Chemical Technology, Part 7, Military Technology: The Gunpowder Epic

Science and Civilisation in China: Volume 5, Chemistry and Chemical Technology, Part 7, Military Technology: The Gunpowder Epic PDF Author: Joseph Needham
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521303583
Category : Technology & Engineering
Languages : en
Pages : 742

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Book Description
The Gunpowder Epic is one of three planned publications on military technology within Dr Needham's immense undertaking. The discovery of gunpowder in China by the 9th century AD was followed by its rapid applications. It is now clear that the whole development from bombs and grenades to the invention of the metal-barrel hand gun took place in the Chinese culture area before Europeans had any knowledge of the mixture itself. Uses in civil engineering and mechanical engineering were equally important, before the knowledge of gunpowder spread to Europe in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Dr Needham's new work continues to demonstrate the major importance of Chinese science and technology to world history and maintains the tradition of one of the great scholarly works of the twentieth century.

The Shorter Science and Civilisation in China:

The Shorter Science and Civilisation in China: PDF Author: Colin A. Ronan
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521338738
Category : Technology & Engineering
Languages : en
Pages : 352

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Book Description
Digesting the main sections of Volume IV of Dr. Needham's magnum opus, this book is concerned with the immense advances made in early and medieval China in mechanical engineering. It discusses in simple but eminently readable terms the status of engineers, their tools and materials, then basic mechanical principles, followed by machinery powered by animals, man and even by steam, vehicles for land transport, six centuries of hidden clockwork, windmills and aeronautics. Since China was far ahead of the West in ancient and medieval times, this volume helps make clear the immense debt owed by Western civilization to the Chinese. Such debts included the important mechanical principles of transforming rotary motion to a to-and-fro motion of a crank and vice-versa. They invented the first efficient harness for horses and the first mechanical clocks.

Science and Civilisation in China: Volume 2, History of Scientific Thought

Science and Civilisation in China: Volume 2, History of Scientific Thought PDF Author: Joseph Needham
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521058001
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 746

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Book Description
The second volume of Dr Joseph Needham's great work Science and Civilisation in China is devoted to the history of scientific thought. Beginning with ancient times, it describes the Confucian milieu in which arose the organic naturalism of the great Taoist school, the scientific philosophy of the Mohists and Logicians, and the quantitative materialism of the Legalists. Thus we are brought on to the fundamental ideas which dominated scientific thinking in the Chinese middle ages. The author opens his discussion by considering the remote and pictographic origins of words fundamental in scientific discourse, and then sets forth the influential doctrines of the Two Forces and the Five Elements. Subsequently he writes of the important sceptical tradition, the effects of Buddhist thought, and the Neo-Confucian climax of Chinese naturalism. Last comes a discussion of the conception of Laws of Nature in China and the West.

A History of Chinese Science and Technology

A History of Chinese Science and Technology PDF Author: Yongxiang Lu
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 3662442574
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 503

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Book Description
A History of Chinese Science and Technology (Volumes 1, 2 & 3) presents 44 individual lectures, beginning with Ancient Chinese Science and Technology in the Process of Human Civilizations and an Overview of Chinese Science and Technology, and continuing with in-depth discussions of several issues in the History of Science and the Needham Puzzle, interspersed with topics on Astronomy, Arithmetic, Agriculture and Medicine, The Four Great Inventions, and various technological areas closely related to clothing, food, shelter and transportation. This book is the most authoritative work on the history of Chinese Science and Technology. It is the Winner of the China Book Award, the Shanghai Book Award (1st prize), and the Classical China International Publishing Project (GAPP, General Administration of Press and Publication of China) and offers an essential resource for academic researchers and non-experts alike. It originated with a series of 44 lectures presented to top Chinese leaders, which received very positive feedback. Written by top Chinese scholars in their respective fields from the Institute for the History of Natural Sciences, Chinese Academy of Sciences and many other respected Chinese organizations, the book is intended for scientists, researchers and postgraduate students working in the history of science, philosophy of science and technology, and related disciplines. Yongxiang Lu is a professor, former president and member of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) and Chinese Academy of Engineering (CAE), and Vice Chairman of the National Congress of China.

Picturing Technology in China

Picturing Technology in China PDF Author: Peter J. Golas
Publisher: Hong Kong University Press
ISBN: 9888208152
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 253

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Book Description
Although the history of technological and scientific illustrations is a well-established field in the West, scholarship on the much longer Chinese experience is still undeveloped. This work by Peter Golas is a short, illustrated overview tracing the subject to pre-Han inscriptions but focusing mainly on the Song, Yuan, Ming, and Qing dynasties. His main theme is that technological drawings developed in a different way in China from in the West largely because they were made by artists rather than by specialist illustrators or practitioners of technology. He examines the techniques of these artists, their use of painting, woodblock prints and the book, and what their drawings reveal about changing technology in agriculture, industry, architecture, astronomical, military, and other spheres. The text is elegantly written, and the images, about 100 in all, are carefully chosen. This is likely to appeal to both scholars and general readers.

On Their Own Terms

On Their Own Terms PDF Author: Benjamin A. Elman
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674036476
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 606

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Book Description
In On Their Own Terms, Benjamin A. Elman offers a much-needed synthesis of early Chinese science during the Jesuit period (1600-1800) and the modern sciences as they evolved in China under Protestant influence (1840s-1900). By 1600 Europe was ahead of Asia in producing basic machines, such as clocks, levers, and pulleys, that would be necessary for the mechanization of agriculture and industry. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Elman shows, Europeans still sought from the Chinese their secrets of producing silk, fine textiles, and porcelain, as well as large-scale tea cultivation. Chinese literati borrowed in turn new algebraic notations of Hindu-Arabic origin, Tychonic cosmology, Euclidian geometry, and various computational advances. Since the middle of the nineteenth century, imperial reformers, early Republicans, Guomindang party cadres, and Chinese Communists have all prioritized science and technology. In this book, Elman gives a nuanced account of the ways in which native Chinese science evolved over four centuries, under the influence of both Jesuit and Protestant missionaries. In the end, he argues, the Chinese produced modern science on their own terms.

Heavenly Clockwork

Heavenly Clockwork PDF Author: Joseph Needham
Publisher: CUP Archive
ISBN: 9780521322768
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 328

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Book Description
A reissue with a foreword and supplement, of a modern classic published in 1960. The invention of the mechanical clock was one of the most important turning points in the history of science and technology. This study revealed six centuries of mechanical clockwork preceding the first mechanical escapement clocks of the West of about AD 1300. Detailed and fully illustrated accounts of elaborate Chinese clocks are accompanied by a discussion of the social context of the Chinese inventions and an assessment of their possible transmission to medieval Europe. For this revised edition, Dr Joseph Needham has contributed a new foreword on recent research and perceptions. In a supplement John H. Combridge details a modern reconstruction of Su Sung's timekeeping device, which together with textual studies modifies our understanding of this important early technology.