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Book ID: CBB396556906

Reckoning with Matter: Calculating Machines, Innovation, and Thinking about Thinking from Pascal to Babbage (2016)

Jones, Matthew L. (Author)

University of Chicago Press
Publication date: 2016
Language: English

ISBN: 9780226411460

Publication Date: 2016
Physical Details: 336 pages

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From Blaise Pascal in the 1600s to Charles Babbage in the first half of the nineteenth century, inventors struggled to create the first calculating machines. All failed—but that does not mean we cannot learn from the trail of ideas, correspondence, machines, and arguments they left behind. In Reckoning with Matter, Matthew L. Jones draws on the remarkably extensive and well-preserved records of the quest to explore the concrete processes involved in imagining, elaborating, testing, and building calculating machines. He explores the writings of philosophers, engineers, and craftspeople, showing how they thought about technical novelty, their distinctive areas of expertise, and ways they could coordinate their efforts. In doing so, Jones argues that the conceptions of creativity and making they exhibited are often more incisive—and more honest—than those that dominate our current legal, political, and aesthetic culture.

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Reviewed By

Review Doron Swade (2018) Review of "Reckoning with Matter: Calculating Machines, Innovation, and Thinking about Thinking from Pascal to Babbage". American Historical Review (pp. 636-637). unapi

Review P. S. Collopy; M. J. Baranay (2019) Review of "The Cybernetics Moment, or, Why We Call Our Age the Information Age". IEEE Annals of the History of Computing (pp. 67-70). unapi

Review Jon Agar (2018) Review of "Reckoning with Matter: Calculating Machines, Innovation, and Thinking about Thinking from Pascal to Babbage". Isis: International Review Devoted to the History of Science and Its Cultural Influences (pp. 634-635). unapi

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