A World on Fire: A Heretic, an Aristocrat, and the Race to Discover Oxygen
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Like Charles Seife's Zeroand 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 Fireillustrates the perilous place of science in an age of unreason.
Liked A World on Fire: A Heretic, an Aristocrat, and the Race to Discover Oxygen? Here’s where I’d start.
These suit anyone who liked A World on Fire: A Heretic, an Aristocrat, and the Race to Discover Oxygen. Sign in and mark a few books for picks shaped around your own taste.
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Measure of the Earth: The Enlightenment Expedition That Reshaped Our World Shares science, history of science, history -
Defining the Wind: The Beaufort Scale, and How a 19th-Century Admiral Turned Science Into Poetry Shares science, nonfiction, history -
Before Galileo: The Advancement of Science in the Middle Ages Shares science, history of science, history -
Ingenious Pursuits: Building the Scientific Revolution Shares science, history of science, history
“If you want more of the same (science), start with these.”
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The Calculus Wars: Newton, Leibniz, and the Greatest Mathematical Clash of All Time
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Brighter than a Thousand Suns: A Personal History of the Atomic Scientists
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The Book Nobody Read: Chasing the Revolutions of Nicolaus Copernicus
- Free onlineFree The Martyrs of Science, or, The lives of Galileo, Tycho Brahe, and Kepler
