Inventing Temperature

By Hasok Chang,

Book cover of Inventing Temperature: Measurement and Scientific Progress

Book description

What is temperature, and how can we measure it correctly? These may seem like simple questions, but the most renowned scientists struggled with them throughout the 18th and 19th centuries. In Inventing Temperature, Chang examines how scientists first created thermometers; how they measured temperature beyond the reach of standard thermometers;…

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Why read it?

1 author picked Inventing Temperature as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?

This book takes what seems to be an incredibly basic feature of the world—temperature—and shows how a tremendous amount of scientific ingenuity and choices made over two centuries contributed to defining and measuring temperatures.

Showing how concepts taken for granted today emerged over time and could have been different helps reveal how little of what we know comes from direct observation. 

From Angela's list on exploring strange features of science.

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The constellation we know as Taurus goes all the way back to cave paintings of aurochs at Lascaux. This book traces the story of the bull in the sky, a journey through the history of what has become known as the sacred bull.

Each of the sections is written from…

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