Skip to main content

Science: a four thousand year history – Patricia Fara *****

This is the rare case of a weighty tome (literally – at over a kilo, my wrists were like jelly by the end) that’s also a page turner. Patricia Fara has managed the near-impossible: a history of all of science. It has been tried before. John Gribbin, for instance, made an attempt with Science: A History – but his book limited itself to Galileo onwards, was 600+ pages long and frankly not all that readable as popular science. Fara’s, despite the weight, slips in at a more manageable 384 pages, covers the whole span of science and was a delight to read.
I have elsewhere been a little heavy on academic authors, which Fara is. All too often, their books read like a transcript of a lecture – and a dull one at that. They never use three syllables when they can get away with four. The writing here isn’t like that. It’s modern, easy to digest and superbly informative. But that’s not to say that the book is simplistic in its approach to science. It’s not just a catalogue of scientific breakthroughs. Not only does Fara do away mostly with Kuhn-style revolutions and individual scientific heroes, she ensures that the science is placed in its essential political and social context. It’s easy to pretend that science is something separate from society – Fara makes it clear that this isn’t the case, and never has been.
It’s hard to pick out any specific examples that stand out, because this is such a magnificent, well-woven sweep through history. From the Babylonian origins of the early precursors to science to the latest genetic research, it’s all there. Yet there’s not a feeling of hasty summary. Fara lingers long enough on key people to get a true popular science feeling of engagement. And she includes the institutions like the Royal Society that have had an impact as much as individuals.
Inevitably there are going to be some small issues. Anything trying to be everything to everyone will stumble occasionally. Being a little biased on the subject of Roger Bacon, I think Fara underplays his significance. Perhaps because the structure of the book leaves ‘experiment’ as a concept until later in the chronology, she makes no mention, for instance, of the way Bacon devotes a whole section of his Opus Majus to the significance of experiment. There’s also the occasional factual oddity. For example, she comments that when Marconi sent a radio message across the Atlantic ‘for the first time, the two sides of the Atlantic were in virtually instantaneous contact,’ which really isn’t true. The difference in speed between radio and the transatlantic cable was relatively slight. She also perpetuates the myth that the term ‘bug’ in computing came from insects shorting out circuits, when the term had been in use in engineering for many years before.
Most seriously, her personal politics are more apparent than is, perhaps, desirable in a book like this. But these are all minor concerns in what is a brilliant undertaking. I hope that the publisher rushes out an affordable mass market paperback version of this book, as it deserves the widest audience possible.

Hardback:  
Using these links earns us commission at no cost to you   
Review by Brian Clegg
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

It's On You - Nick Chater and George Loewenstein *****

Going on the cover you might think this was a political polemic - and admittedly there's an element of that - but the reason it's so good is quite different. It shows how behavioural economics and social psychology have led us astray by putting the focus way too much on individuals. A particular target is the concept of nudges which (as described in Brainjacking ) have been hugely over-rated. But overall the key problem ties to another psychological concept: framing. Huge kudos to both Nick Chater and George Loewenstein - a behavioural scientist and an economics and psychology professor - for having the guts to take on the flaws in their own earlier work and that of colleagues, because they make clear just how limited and potentially dangerous is the belief that individuals changing their behaviour can solve large-scale problems. The main thesis of the book is that there are two ways to approach the major problems we face - an 'i-frame' where we focus on the individual ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Introducing Artificial Intelligence – Henry Brighton & Howard Selina ****

It is almost impossible to rate these relentlessly hip books – they are pure marmite*. The huge  Introducing  … series (a vast range of books covering everything from Quantum Theory to Islam), previously known as …  for Beginners , puts across the message in a style that owes as much to Terry Gilliam and pop art as it does to popular science. Pretty well every page features large graphics with speech bubbles that are supposed to emphasise the point. Funnily,  Introducing Artificial Intelligence  is both a good and bad example of the series. Let’s get the bad bits out of the way first. The illustrators of these books are very variable, and I didn’t particularly like the pictures here. They did add something – the illustrations in these books always have a lot of information content, rather than being window dressing – but they seemed more detached from the text and rather lacking in the oomph the best versions have. The other real problem is that...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Laws of Thought - Tom Griffiths *****

In giving us a history of attempts to explain our thinking abilities, Tom Griffiths demonstrates an excellent ability to pitch information just right for the informed general reader.  We begin with Aristotelian logic and the way Boole and others transformed it into a kind of arithmetic before a first introduction of computing and theories of language. Griffiths covers a surprising amount of ground - we don't just get, for instance, the obvious figures of Turing, von Neumann and Shannon, but the interaction between the computing pioneers and those concerned with trying to understand the way we think - for example in the work of Jerome Bruner, of whom I confess I'd never heard.  This would prove to be the case with a whole host of people who have made interesting contributions to the understanding of human thought processes. Sometimes their theories were contradictory - this isn't an easy field to successfully observe - but always they were interesting. But for me, at least, ...
Post a Comment
Read more