Now that '3-D models' are so often digital displays on flat screens, it is timely to look back at the solid models that were once the third dimension of science. This book is about wooden ships and plastic molecules, wax bodies and a perspex economy, monuments in cork and mathematics in plaster, casts of diseases, habitat dioramas, and extinct monsters rebuilt in bricks and mortar. These remarkable artefacts were fixtures of laboratories and lecture halls, studios and workshops, dockyards and museums. Considering such objects together for the first time, this interdisciplinary volume demonstrates how, in research as well as in teaching, 3-D models played major roles in making knowledge. Accessible and original chapters by leading scholars highlight the special properties of models, explore the interplay between representation in two dimensions and three, and investigate the shift to modelling with computers. The book is fascinating reading for anyone interested in the sciences, medicine, and technology, and in collections and museums.

Author: Soraya De Chadarevian
Binding Type: Paperback
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Published: 07/15/2004
Series: Writing Science
Pages: 488
Weight: 1.42lbs
Size: 9.04h x 6.42w x 1.06d
ISBN: 9780804739726


Review Citation(s):
Choice 01/01/2005 pg. 873
Scitech Book News 12/01/2004 pg. 14

About the Author
Soraya de Chadarevian is Senior Research Associate in the Department of History and Philosophy of Science, University of Cambridge. She is the author, most recently, of Designs for Life: Molecular Biology after World War II (2002). Nick Hopwood is Lecturer in the Department of History and Philosophy of Science, University of Cambridge. His publications include Embryos in Wax: Models from the Ziegler Studio (2002).