Skip to main content

The Rise of Science - Peter Shaver ***

This is a bit of weird one. The book combines history and philosophy of science with everything from an assessment of religion to futurology and it's hard to see how it all fits together.

We begin with the history bit. In an 84-page section, Peter Shaver takes us on a whirlwind tour of the entire history of science. It's too long to be compact, but too short to develop any interesting stories. We then go on to a rather laboured collection of requirements for knowledge elicitation (things like curiosity, imagination, determination and so forth), an exploration of the nature of science today and a brief consideration of the future.

Throughout, the presentation is very summary (except, perhaps for those requirements for knowledge, which seem to go on too long - but that may be because they themselves are too summary). We end up with a collection of facts - never getting into enough depth and lacking any sense of narrative flow. There is plenty of information here but it could almost be bullet points or PowerPoint slides. And while there are a few factoids that stand out (the length of the Great Wall of China and the fact that 90 per cent of the scientists who ever lived are alive today, for example), a fair amount of the material feels distinctly ‘tell me something I don’t know‘, like ‘the Internet and telecommunications revolution have dramatically changed our world.‘

Although history of science is important to the development of Shaver's book, the content can be mixed in its accuracy. We are told that Pythagoras was responsible for the Pythagorean theorem (we don't know who was, but it certainly wasn't Pythagoras), that Lippershey invented the telescope (he didn't), that Bruno was burned at the stake 'in part for being a proponent of the heliocentric model' (it wasn't the reason), that Newton was first raised by 'his parents' (his father died before he was born) and, remarkably, Shaver manages to describe the development of the laser without mentioning either of two main laser pioneers, Gould and Maiman.

Sitting particularly uncomfortably with the rest is a distinctly Janet and John set of descriptions of world religions (supposedly there to highlight the conflict between religion and science, though little is done to follow this thesis up). My favourite part was ‘Another schism with the Catholic Church was caused by England’s Henry VIII, who wanted a new wife; the result was the new Church of England.’ This could have come straight from the parody history book 1066 And All That.

I struggle to understand who this book is aimed at or what it's supposed to do for the reader. A far better exploration of how science came into being is David Wooton's The Invention of Science. There's no doubt that The Rise of Science does more than Wooton's book by trying to relate science to modern society, to put it into a wider context and to explore just what science is. But the way the book is put together does not help it in this purpose. Frustrating.
Paperback:  

Kindle:  
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

The Antigravity Enigma - Andrew May ****

Antigravity - the ability to overcome the pull of gravity - has been a fantasy for thousands of years and subject to more scientific (if impractical) fictional representation since H. G. Wells came up with cavorite in The First Men in the Moon . But is it plausible scientifically?  Andrew May does a good job of pulling together three ways of looking at our love affair with antigravity (and the related concept of cancelling inertia) - in science fiction, in physics and in pseudoscience and crankery. As May points out, science fiction is an important starting point as the concept was deployed there well before we had a good enough understanding of gravity to make any sensible scientific stabs at the idea (even though, for instance, Michael Faraday did unsuccessfully experiment with a possible interaction between gravity and electromagnetism). We then get onto the science itself, noting the potential impact on any ideas of antigravity that come from the move from a Newtonian view of a...
Post a Comment
Read more

The World as We Know It - Peter Dear ***

History professor Peter Dear gives us a detailed and reasoned coverage of the development of science as a concept from its origins as natural philosophy, covering the years from the eighteenth to the twentieth century. inclusive If that sounds a little dry, frankly, it is. But if you don't mind a very academic approach, it is certainly interesting. Obviously a major theme running through is the move from largely gentleman natural philosophers (with both implications of that word 'gentleman') to professional academic scientists. What started with clubs for relatively well off men with an interest, when universities did not stray far beyond what was included in mathematics (astronomy, for instance), would become a very different beast. The main scientific subjects that Dear covers are physics and biology - we get, for instance, a lot on the gradual move away from a purely mechanical views of physics - the reason Newton's 'action at a distance' gravity caused such ...
Post a Comment
Read more

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