About this item

The remarkable story of how an artist and a scientist in seventeenth-century Holland transformed the way we see the world.On a summer day in 1674, in the small Dutch city of Delft, Antoni van Leeuwenhoek -- a cloth salesman, local bureaucrat, and self-taught natural philosopher -- gazed through a tiny lens set into a brass holder and discovered a never-before imagined world of microscopic life. At the same time, in a nearby attic, the painter Johannes Vermeer was using another optical device, a camera obscura, to experiment with light and create the most luminous pictures ever beheld."See for yourself!" was the clarion call of the 1600s. Scientists peered at nature through microscopes and telescopes, making the discoveries in astronomy, physics, chemistry, and anatomy that ignited the Scientific Revolution.



About the Author

Laura J. Snyder

Laura J. Snyder is a historian, philosopher and writer. She is the author of "Eye of the Beholder: Johannes Vermeer, Antoni Van Leeuwenhoek and the Reinvention of Seeing," a 2015 Christie's Best Art Book and a 2015 New Scientist Best Read, and winner of the 2016 Sally Hacker Prize of the Society for the History of Technology. She is also the author of "The Philosophical Breakfast Club: Four Remarkable Friends who Transformed Science and Changed the World," which was a Scientific American Notable Book, winner of the Royal Institution of Australia's 2011 poll for Best Science Book and official selection of the TED Book Club, as well as "Reforming Philosophy: A Victorian Debate on Science and Society." Snyder's writing has appeared in The Wall Street Journal, Slate, and other publications. Her TED Talk on the Philosophical Breakfast Club has been viewed over one million times. Watch it here: http://on.ted.com/i074p



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