Review
"This richly illustrated book deeply renews the meaning of accurate reproduction by showing how many ways there have been to be 'true to nature.' Art, science, and reproduction techniques are merged to show that 'things in themselves' can be presented with their vast and beautiful company. This splendid book will be for many years the ultimate compendium on the joint history of objectivity and visualization." -- Bruno Latour, author of Politics of Nature: How to Bring the Sciences into Democracy
(Bruno Latour)
"This is a deeply researched book that will make you think. It is beautiful, and it is important....I recommend it to anyone -- optimist or pessimist, female or male -- with a healthy dash of curiosity and a cranium." -- Oren Harman, Bar Ilan University, Israel, The European Legacy
"As Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison point out in their capacious and engaging study of the concept of scientific objectivity from the 17th century to the present day, the universal form is key to understanding how modern science moved from the study of curiosities, through the representations of perfect, notional specimens, to a concept of objectivity as responsibility for science." Brian Dillon Modern Painters
"The author's argument here is complicated but fascinating (and, because the argument is about images, the book is beautiful)." Science
"This is a surprising, engrossing book that treats humanity's struggle to unsnarl the world and itself as a field of endless turmoil and fascination." Rain Taxi
"We need history of science in the style of Daston and Galison: a history of science that commands the details but at the same time discerns the shape of larger developmentsand that makes us realize just how many meanings have been packed into the little word 'objectivity,' which rolls so trippingly off the tongue." Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung
About the Author
Lorraine Daston is Director at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin, Germany. She is the coauthor of
Wonders and the Order of Nature, 1150-1750 and the editor of
Things That Talk: Object Lessons from Art and Science (both Zone Books).
Peter Galison is Pellegrino University Professor of the History of Science and of Physics at Harvard University. He is the author of
Einstein's Clocks, Poincaré's Maps: Empires of Time, How Experiments End, and
Image and Logic: A Material Culture of Microphysics, among other books, and coeditor (with Emily Thompson) of
The Architecture of Science (MIT Press, 1999).
