Popular Science
Pseudodoxia Epidemica was a valuable source of information which found itself upon the shelves of many homes in seventeenth century England. Being in the vanguard of the scientific writing, it paved the way for much subsequent popular scientific journalism. Its science includes many examples of Browne's 'at-first-hand' empiricism as well as early examples of the formulation of scientific hypothesis.
The second of Pseudodoxia Epidemica's seven books entitled Tenets concerning Mineral and Vegetable Bodies includes Browne's experiments with static electricity and magnetism — the word electricity being one of many neologisms including medical, pathology, hallucination, literary, and computer, which Browne's vigorous inventiveness coined into the vocabulary of the early scientific revolution.
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Famous quotes containing the words popular and/or science:
“All official institutions of language are repeating machines: school, sports, advertising, popular songs, news, all continually repeat the same structure, the same meaning, often the same words: the stereotype is a political fact, the major figure of ideology.”
—Roland Barthes (1915–1980)
“My position is a naturalistic one; I see philosophy not as an a priori propaedeutic or groundwork for science, but as continuous with science. I see philosophy and science as in the same boat—a boat which, to revert to Neurath’s figure as I so often do, we can rebuild only at sea while staying afloat in it. There is no external vantage point, no first philosophy.”
—Willard Van Orman Quine (b. 1908)