A Life of Learning by Robert K. Merton默顿学术思想评传

Publications

• "Science, Technology and Society in Seventeenth Century England", Osiris, Vol. IV, pt. 2, pp. 360–632. Bruges: St. Catherine Press, 1938, reissued: Howard Fertig, 2001, ISBN 0-86527-434-7– The 1938 publication made Merton well known among historians of science . It was an attempt to refute Boris Hessen's famous Marxist account of 1931 The Socio-economic Roots of Newton's Principia.
• Social Theory and Social Structure (1949; revised and expanded, 1957 and 1968)
• The Sociology of Science(1973)
• Sociological Ambivalence (1976)
• On the Shoulders of Giants: A Shandean Postscript (1985)
• On Social Structure and Science (1996; edited by Piotr Sztompka)
• The Travels and Adventures of Serendipity: A Study in Sociological Semantics and the Sociology of Science, 2004

The 1600s were science's sunrise century. It was then that Galileo first trained a telescope on the night sky, Kepler discerned the shape of planetary orbits and Newton showed how gravitation dictated them. Descartes's geometry and Leibniz's calculus date from the 17th century, as do the first proper microscopes, telescopes, slide rules, wind-speed gauges, pendulum clocks and vacuum pumps, plus the discovery of Jupiter's moons and Saturn's rings. Such developments indelibly altered sensibilities, revealing that human inquiry, if aided by advancing technology, is potentially limitless. As Philip Ball writes in "Curiosity: How Science Became Interested in Everything," the 1600s "began