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A History of Western Science
Presented in an informal, narrative style, this text looks at science, from the ancient world , to medieval science, the scientific revolution, through to 20th century physics. This edition offers more coverage of 20th century history , wars, and technology; more on Albert Einstein; and more on quantum mechanics and philosophy. For all those interested in science, history, philosophy, physics, and engineering.
464 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1992
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February 11, 2023
With its epic historical scope, this book superficially appears to be a welcome survey of the history of science from early Mesopotamia to the 20th century. But hold on to your hats, because it’s going to be a bumpy ride through Anthony Alioto’s psyche, and it’s going to end with pseudoscientific nonsense like morphic fields. The book is ultimately a failure because of Alioto’s bizarrely emotional rejection of science itself. This is compounded by a huge number of factual errors.
I read this book because it was advertised by historians as a comprehensive but compact treatment of the development of science. (Compact it is - Pico della Mirandola merits a single sentence, and Dmitri Mendeleev not even that.) Indeed much of it is a mostly standard recounting of the history of science, with all the usual characters and events. This led me to start thinking of a four-star review… then three… then two… and ultimately one.
Because the book collapses under Alioto’s ill-informed commentary related to the nature of science, and his gross distortions of real scientific thought. This first appears in brief glimpses - the introduction, the interlude, brief comments at the ends of chapters. But soon it becomes more pervasive as we move into modern science. Alioto rants about Hume dismissing god (p. 275), claims Marx failed because he “fell to his knees before the throne of science” (p. 316), and then progressively goes more and more off the rails.
The primary issue is that Alioto both does not understand what science is, and greatly dislikes modern science. This makes it difficult to construct a proper history of science, and makes it impossible to do in a reasonable, objective way. He starts with his contention that the ancient identification of gods with things is “good science” (p. 8), continues with his embrace of Feyerabend’s relativism and the notion that “all myths [which includes modern science]… must be given equal time” (p. 165), and reaches an interesting crescendo with his casual assertion that of course out-of-body experiences are real (p. 323).
Like… what?
Alioto is generally careful not to criticize many things modern readers would find absurd in the views of various thinkers throughout history. Which is appropriate in his role as a historian - no one should demand that Thales or Roger Bacon meet the publication standards of Physical Review in 1992. Indeed Alioto often adopts the voice of whatever figure he’s discussing, speaking ideas as he thinks they would. But he does a complete 180 on this approach, descending into a complete rant against Hume (p. 275) and the Enlightenment project to rid science of religion and mysticism. It’s… bizarre.
The idea that, say, Robert Grosseteste or ibn-Sina (Avicenna) were not in any way trying to be precursors to science as we currently understand it, and were trying to answer their own questions about the world in their own frameworks, is a point well taken. The point that science proceeds in a somewhat unruly fashion and not according to the exact steps of any explicit method is also a good one, although unoriginal and not something that would actually be contested by any working scientist. (This caricature of science is admittedly often presented to 12-year-olds in middle school, but the schooling of young children is filled with all sorts of distorting simplifications, like the idea that multiplication is defined as repeated addition or that essays should have five paragraphs.)
Alioto’s issues with science run far deeper, though, going so far as to accuse those who trust modern science of “scientism” (p. 315). Historians have a problematic predilection for using the word “science” as it would have been defined many hundreds of years ago - as a term meaning “knowledge” generally. By ignoring what the word now means in English, they cause confusion. For what purpose I’m unsure, but perhaps to inflate the consequence of their own research or to insist upon its modern relevance?
This alone would be problematic enough, but when combined with absurd relativism over the nature of knowledge, it becomes intolerable. I suspect that those in the humanities, and to a lesser extent those in the social sciences, are reluctant to label any human system as unique. What counts as “dance” or “literature” or “religion” varies dramatically from place to place and time to time, and most of us should admit that choosing Cervantes over Homer or Christianity over Hinduism is a personal preference depending both on the unique individual and the society in which they were raised.
However, when such relativism is extended to the nature of reality, it’s remarkably unhelpful. A lump of iron could be modeled as made of water, triangles, a mixture of mercury and sulphur, or as made of a pure element defined by having 26 protons in its nucleus. All such models have been proposed. It’s abdicating all responsibility to throw up one’s hands and say all these models are equally valid, or to even suggest that they might be because, as Alioto says, “Whether objectivity is subjectivity in another guise remains an open question” (p. 210). To see why, consider asking if it’s equally helpful to your survival to eat eggs and toast for breakfast or to eat pumice and motor oil. The relativist who truly believes that all theories are equally valid does not live long.
Alioto, of course, is not a true relativist. No one is. So it’s left for us to decide if he professes relativism to curry favor with postmodern academics (remember this book was published in 1988 and then revised almost immediately for a second edition in 1992) or if he thinks such intellectual posturing makes him look wiser than I. Bernard Cohen, Alexandre Koyré, Stillman Drake, and those other poor historians of science who preceded him.
Problematic for taking this as good historical survey is the fact that Alioto has a predilection for thoughts and thinkers that are heterodox and unique - as long as they agree with Alioto’s own instincts towards spirituality. For example, in the mid twentieth century he focuses heavily on David Bohm’s ideas on quantum mechanics, and only the most mystical and nonscientific portions (nothing about real pilot wave theory). In this way Alioto gives a grossly distorted view of the science, presenting as valid ideas on quantum mechanics that no modern physicist would agree with. One is left to wonder if he has similarly grossly distorted his presentations of all other epochs of history as well. The cultural milieu of working scientists is important, but then it would be critical to note that Bohm’s ideas were never popular or widely influential.
After completing this book, I looked up Alioto. I am unsurprised to learn that despite his start in history, he ended up in a religious studies chair. Not surprised at all.
- - -
I’ll close with a list of scientific ideas Alioto gets completely wrong. The fact that I can clearly see his incompetence when he deals with things I know makes me wonder how much he gets wrong on topics I’m not an expert in, like biology.
p. 239 “The mass of a body near the surface of the earth is called the gravitational mass.” His explanation for force, acceleration, gravitational and inertial mass in this section is appalling. He confuses force, mass, and density, and bizarrely claims gravitational mass only exists near the surface of the earth, which is just incoherent physics but also misses a crucial historical point. The great achievement of Newton was realizing the universality of the law of gravity, and the idea that interactions - calculated by the objects’ gravitational masses - continued to arbitrarily large distances.
p. 373: “Matter is a continuum.” Alioto makes an immense fuss over what he claims to be Einstein showing that matter is a continuum, weirdly comparing it to Stoicism, the Cabala, and Buddhism. I cannot stress strongly enough that Einstein’s equations do not do this. The energy-momentum tensor can describe any collection of matter, from a continuous fluid to a set of discrete points. This is very well known. Indeed the first and perhaps most famous solution of Einstein’s equations is the Schwarzschild metric, which in the case of a black hole takes all the mass to be at a single geometric point. Test masses are assumed to be points for geodesic calculations. The problem here is that Alioto misunderstands the concept of a field - just because a field has a value at all points in space doesn’t mean that value is nonzero.
p. 374: Einstein showed that matter was “the curvature of space.” Entirely untrue. Matter and spacetime are clearly distinct in relativity. They influence each other, of course, but that is nothing like equality. If you doubt this, note that gravitational waves - which Einstein himself found the solution for - constitute a propagating curvature of spacetime with entirely no matter present, that a single point particle alone in the universe will curve every point in spacetime (Schwarzschild metric), and that a universe entirely devoid of matter and energy will not be flat (FLRW metric with no mass-energy or cosmological constant will have nonzero curvature).
p. 389: Wave function collapse “means that observing the system forces it into ‘reality’.” To the contrary, in quantum mechanics the wave function is as real as real gets all the time, even in the Copenhagen formulation before and after collapse.
p. 394: “The neutron, a chargeless particle nearly as heavy as the proton.” The neutron is more massive than the proton, which seems like a minor detail except that without this key fact the free neutron would be a stable particle. It’s crucially important that it’s not, as Alioto himself notes later on.
p. 395: “Elementary particles were no longer immutable, for they could be ‘created’ (more than two hundred have been created in high-energy accelerators since).” I don’t know why “created” is in quotes there, but my primary objection to this is his numerical figure. While technically true, it’s useless, and essentially the same as saying “there are more than two grains of sand on Earth”. If he's talking about numbers of kinds of elementary particles, then he's still dramatically wrong. The Standard Model of particle physics has 17 elementary particles, all of which had been theorized but only 14 of which had been created in the lab when Alioto was writing. (The top quark, tau neutrino, and Higgs boson had not yet been observed.) It's important to note that other kinds of particles, like the entire hadron family, are composite particles and not elementary.
p. 403: “The Milky Way with its roughly billion stars.” There are roughly one hundred billion stars in the the Milky Way, and this was known when Alioto wrote this book. If you don’t feel a factor of 100 is important, try treating a centenarian and an infant as equivalent. Alioto makes hay earlier in this book from the fact that some people historically had been wrong about the Earth’s size by a factor of roughly two (like Columbus).
p. 404: “Hubble found that every galaxy whose distance he could measure showed the red shift.” No, he didn’t. His original 1929 paper has several galaxies with blueshifts, and a helpful (and incredibly famous) plot to make this super obvious. I understand Alioto not wanting to get into the distinction between peculiar velocity and Hubble flow, but when he says things that are untrue and makes it very obvious he didn’t review the primary literature or get a good understanding of the secondary literature, it makes me mistrust everything else he’s said.
p. 407: A star may “die in a cataclysmic explosion, a nova; it may swell and die, eventually becoming a black dwarf; or it may explode leaving its atoms crushed into neutrons, an immensely dense neutron star.” This is almost entirely wrong. Novae are not associated with stellar death at all. Cataclysmic explosions in stellar death are called supernovae, and they are the explosions that lead to neutron stars (and black holes). Normally we talk of white dwarfs, rather than black dwarfs, but to give more credit to Alioto than is due, it’s true if you wait much longer than the universe has currently existed eventually they’ll stop glowing in the visible. (The coldest white dwarf known to date is about the same temperature as our Sun, so yeah.)
p. 422: “How can chemistry and biology be more mechanical, deterministic, and concrete ontologically than the material from which they come?” Several confusions of Alioto’s combine here. First, he has an entire section earlier in the book on statistical mechanics, a subject which explains in great detail how many random processes can combine together to make a pretty deterministic process (e.g., the Second Law of Thermodynamics). Second, there is confusion about levels of description. Humans exist. Atoms also exist. Humans are made of atoms, but this does not mean humans don’t really exist. Any sensible ontology would accept humans as an existing thing, even though they actually arise from of a pattern of many smaller things. This is no different from saying that “temperature” is a real, useful concept, even though it’s only defined in certain circumstances and really arises by averaging the kinetic energies of small particles. Third, Alioto believes quantum-level things do not really exist. But everything can be written as a wave function, including, say, planets or Anthony Alioto, not just individual particles. Quantum fields are the most real thing we have in our current ontology, if by “most real” you mean “most fundamental.” They only seem less real to Alioto because he has trouble picturing them. But that only tells us something about Alioto, not something about quantum field theory or about reality.
p. 423: “Physics must absolutely include consciousness within its most basic building materials.” No, it musn’t. Just a chapter earlier Alioto makes clear that “observation” within quantum mechanics has nothing to do with a conscious observer, but here we see that he only included observations by instruments because his source materials told him to. He didn’t understand why, or internalize the message. There is nothing fundamental about consciousness in quantum mechanics. At all. Nothing. Zip. Nada. Let’s repeat, because Alioto doesn’t understand this at all: consciousness plays no role in quantum mechanics. Even in the Copenhagen interpretation we only need macroscopic objects of any kind to collapse a wave function. The macroscopic object could be a rock on Mars.
I read this book because it was advertised by historians as a comprehensive but compact treatment of the development of science. (Compact it is - Pico della Mirandola merits a single sentence, and Dmitri Mendeleev not even that.) Indeed much of it is a mostly standard recounting of the history of science, with all the usual characters and events. This led me to start thinking of a four-star review… then three… then two… and ultimately one.
Because the book collapses under Alioto’s ill-informed commentary related to the nature of science, and his gross distortions of real scientific thought. This first appears in brief glimpses - the introduction, the interlude, brief comments at the ends of chapters. But soon it becomes more pervasive as we move into modern science. Alioto rants about Hume dismissing god (p. 275), claims Marx failed because he “fell to his knees before the throne of science” (p. 316), and then progressively goes more and more off the rails.
The primary issue is that Alioto both does not understand what science is, and greatly dislikes modern science. This makes it difficult to construct a proper history of science, and makes it impossible to do in a reasonable, objective way. He starts with his contention that the ancient identification of gods with things is “good science” (p. 8), continues with his embrace of Feyerabend’s relativism and the notion that “all myths [which includes modern science]… must be given equal time” (p. 165), and reaches an interesting crescendo with his casual assertion that of course out-of-body experiences are real (p. 323).
Like… what?
Alioto is generally careful not to criticize many things modern readers would find absurd in the views of various thinkers throughout history. Which is appropriate in his role as a historian - no one should demand that Thales or Roger Bacon meet the publication standards of Physical Review in 1992. Indeed Alioto often adopts the voice of whatever figure he’s discussing, speaking ideas as he thinks they would. But he does a complete 180 on this approach, descending into a complete rant against Hume (p. 275) and the Enlightenment project to rid science of religion and mysticism. It’s… bizarre.
The idea that, say, Robert Grosseteste or ibn-Sina (Avicenna) were not in any way trying to be precursors to science as we currently understand it, and were trying to answer their own questions about the world in their own frameworks, is a point well taken. The point that science proceeds in a somewhat unruly fashion and not according to the exact steps of any explicit method is also a good one, although unoriginal and not something that would actually be contested by any working scientist. (This caricature of science is admittedly often presented to 12-year-olds in middle school, but the schooling of young children is filled with all sorts of distorting simplifications, like the idea that multiplication is defined as repeated addition or that essays should have five paragraphs.)
Alioto’s issues with science run far deeper, though, going so far as to accuse those who trust modern science of “scientism” (p. 315). Historians have a problematic predilection for using the word “science” as it would have been defined many hundreds of years ago - as a term meaning “knowledge” generally. By ignoring what the word now means in English, they cause confusion. For what purpose I’m unsure, but perhaps to inflate the consequence of their own research or to insist upon its modern relevance?
This alone would be problematic enough, but when combined with absurd relativism over the nature of knowledge, it becomes intolerable. I suspect that those in the humanities, and to a lesser extent those in the social sciences, are reluctant to label any human system as unique. What counts as “dance” or “literature” or “religion” varies dramatically from place to place and time to time, and most of us should admit that choosing Cervantes over Homer or Christianity over Hinduism is a personal preference depending both on the unique individual and the society in which they were raised.
However, when such relativism is extended to the nature of reality, it’s remarkably unhelpful. A lump of iron could be modeled as made of water, triangles, a mixture of mercury and sulphur, or as made of a pure element defined by having 26 protons in its nucleus. All such models have been proposed. It’s abdicating all responsibility to throw up one’s hands and say all these models are equally valid, or to even suggest that they might be because, as Alioto says, “Whether objectivity is subjectivity in another guise remains an open question” (p. 210). To see why, consider asking if it’s equally helpful to your survival to eat eggs and toast for breakfast or to eat pumice and motor oil. The relativist who truly believes that all theories are equally valid does not live long.
Alioto, of course, is not a true relativist. No one is. So it’s left for us to decide if he professes relativism to curry favor with postmodern academics (remember this book was published in 1988 and then revised almost immediately for a second edition in 1992) or if he thinks such intellectual posturing makes him look wiser than I. Bernard Cohen, Alexandre Koyré, Stillman Drake, and those other poor historians of science who preceded him.
Problematic for taking this as good historical survey is the fact that Alioto has a predilection for thoughts and thinkers that are heterodox and unique - as long as they agree with Alioto’s own instincts towards spirituality. For example, in the mid twentieth century he focuses heavily on David Bohm’s ideas on quantum mechanics, and only the most mystical and nonscientific portions (nothing about real pilot wave theory). In this way Alioto gives a grossly distorted view of the science, presenting as valid ideas on quantum mechanics that no modern physicist would agree with. One is left to wonder if he has similarly grossly distorted his presentations of all other epochs of history as well. The cultural milieu of working scientists is important, but then it would be critical to note that Bohm’s ideas were never popular or widely influential.
After completing this book, I looked up Alioto. I am unsurprised to learn that despite his start in history, he ended up in a religious studies chair. Not surprised at all.
- - -
I’ll close with a list of scientific ideas Alioto gets completely wrong. The fact that I can clearly see his incompetence when he deals with things I know makes me wonder how much he gets wrong on topics I’m not an expert in, like biology.
p. 239 “The mass of a body near the surface of the earth is called the gravitational mass.” His explanation for force, acceleration, gravitational and inertial mass in this section is appalling. He confuses force, mass, and density, and bizarrely claims gravitational mass only exists near the surface of the earth, which is just incoherent physics but also misses a crucial historical point. The great achievement of Newton was realizing the universality of the law of gravity, and the idea that interactions - calculated by the objects’ gravitational masses - continued to arbitrarily large distances.
p. 373: “Matter is a continuum.” Alioto makes an immense fuss over what he claims to be Einstein showing that matter is a continuum, weirdly comparing it to Stoicism, the Cabala, and Buddhism. I cannot stress strongly enough that Einstein’s equations do not do this. The energy-momentum tensor can describe any collection of matter, from a continuous fluid to a set of discrete points. This is very well known. Indeed the first and perhaps most famous solution of Einstein’s equations is the Schwarzschild metric, which in the case of a black hole takes all the mass to be at a single geometric point. Test masses are assumed to be points for geodesic calculations. The problem here is that Alioto misunderstands the concept of a field - just because a field has a value at all points in space doesn’t mean that value is nonzero.
p. 374: Einstein showed that matter was “the curvature of space.” Entirely untrue. Matter and spacetime are clearly distinct in relativity. They influence each other, of course, but that is nothing like equality. If you doubt this, note that gravitational waves - which Einstein himself found the solution for - constitute a propagating curvature of spacetime with entirely no matter present, that a single point particle alone in the universe will curve every point in spacetime (Schwarzschild metric), and that a universe entirely devoid of matter and energy will not be flat (FLRW metric with no mass-energy or cosmological constant will have nonzero curvature).
p. 389: Wave function collapse “means that observing the system forces it into ‘reality’.” To the contrary, in quantum mechanics the wave function is as real as real gets all the time, even in the Copenhagen formulation before and after collapse.
p. 394: “The neutron, a chargeless particle nearly as heavy as the proton.” The neutron is more massive than the proton, which seems like a minor detail except that without this key fact the free neutron would be a stable particle. It’s crucially important that it’s not, as Alioto himself notes later on.
p. 395: “Elementary particles were no longer immutable, for they could be ‘created’ (more than two hundred have been created in high-energy accelerators since).” I don’t know why “created” is in quotes there, but my primary objection to this is his numerical figure. While technically true, it’s useless, and essentially the same as saying “there are more than two grains of sand on Earth”. If he's talking about numbers of kinds of elementary particles, then he's still dramatically wrong. The Standard Model of particle physics has 17 elementary particles, all of which had been theorized but only 14 of which had been created in the lab when Alioto was writing. (The top quark, tau neutrino, and Higgs boson had not yet been observed.) It's important to note that other kinds of particles, like the entire hadron family, are composite particles and not elementary.
p. 403: “The Milky Way with its roughly billion stars.” There are roughly one hundred billion stars in the the Milky Way, and this was known when Alioto wrote this book. If you don’t feel a factor of 100 is important, try treating a centenarian and an infant as equivalent. Alioto makes hay earlier in this book from the fact that some people historically had been wrong about the Earth’s size by a factor of roughly two (like Columbus).
p. 404: “Hubble found that every galaxy whose distance he could measure showed the red shift.” No, he didn’t. His original 1929 paper has several galaxies with blueshifts, and a helpful (and incredibly famous) plot to make this super obvious. I understand Alioto not wanting to get into the distinction between peculiar velocity and Hubble flow, but when he says things that are untrue and makes it very obvious he didn’t review the primary literature or get a good understanding of the secondary literature, it makes me mistrust everything else he’s said.
p. 407: A star may “die in a cataclysmic explosion, a nova; it may swell and die, eventually becoming a black dwarf; or it may explode leaving its atoms crushed into neutrons, an immensely dense neutron star.” This is almost entirely wrong. Novae are not associated with stellar death at all. Cataclysmic explosions in stellar death are called supernovae, and they are the explosions that lead to neutron stars (and black holes). Normally we talk of white dwarfs, rather than black dwarfs, but to give more credit to Alioto than is due, it’s true if you wait much longer than the universe has currently existed eventually they’ll stop glowing in the visible. (The coldest white dwarf known to date is about the same temperature as our Sun, so yeah.)
p. 422: “How can chemistry and biology be more mechanical, deterministic, and concrete ontologically than the material from which they come?” Several confusions of Alioto’s combine here. First, he has an entire section earlier in the book on statistical mechanics, a subject which explains in great detail how many random processes can combine together to make a pretty deterministic process (e.g., the Second Law of Thermodynamics). Second, there is confusion about levels of description. Humans exist. Atoms also exist. Humans are made of atoms, but this does not mean humans don’t really exist. Any sensible ontology would accept humans as an existing thing, even though they actually arise from of a pattern of many smaller things. This is no different from saying that “temperature” is a real, useful concept, even though it’s only defined in certain circumstances and really arises by averaging the kinetic energies of small particles. Third, Alioto believes quantum-level things do not really exist. But everything can be written as a wave function, including, say, planets or Anthony Alioto, not just individual particles. Quantum fields are the most real thing we have in our current ontology, if by “most real” you mean “most fundamental.” They only seem less real to Alioto because he has trouble picturing them. But that only tells us something about Alioto, not something about quantum field theory or about reality.
p. 423: “Physics must absolutely include consciousness within its most basic building materials.” No, it musn’t. Just a chapter earlier Alioto makes clear that “observation” within quantum mechanics has nothing to do with a conscious observer, but here we see that he only included observations by instruments because his source materials told him to. He didn’t understand why, or internalize the message. There is nothing fundamental about consciousness in quantum mechanics. At all. Nothing. Zip. Nada. Let’s repeat, because Alioto doesn’t understand this at all: consciousness plays no role in quantum mechanics. Even in the Copenhagen interpretation we only need macroscopic objects of any kind to collapse a wave function. The macroscopic object could be a rock on Mars.
February 22, 2018
While I often disagree with Alioto on his interpretations of quantum mechanics (esp. in regard to its relation to Freudian and Jungian psychology) along with his seeming acceptance of Paul Feyerabend's analysis of modern science, this is a wonderfully written book with a great amount of historical information in it.
Especially up to quantum mechanics, I found the book's analysis insightful and useful. It covers from ancient Egypt all the way to the modern ideas of science in the 1980-1990s. Even with such a broad array of topics, Alioto writes in a compelling way with good analysis of how society influenced and was influenced by science (or its "equivalent" of the time).
Having said that, his interpretations of quantum mechanics are far too radical in my opinion. (For what it's worth I've taken and passed graduate level quantum mechanics courses as a physics graduate student). He takes quantum physics to imply that there must be an observer, while more modern quantum books tend to not strongly display this quality, because it isn't so obvious it is a necessary part of the theory. (For example Everett many-worlds doesn't require anything special of the observer, which Alioto even admits at one point). Lastly, his epilogue compares modern science to a priesthood and talks about "other ways of knowing". This may be true, but he has done nothing in the book to motivate this [what does it mean to know something in a non-scientific way? Like math? But he refers to Eastern mysticism...]. It's true that science is influenced by society but I think he goes too far in society determining "truth" whatever that is.
At least the final section reminds scientists that what we often call "truth" in a model is not "Truth". We have models that seem to correspond with reality and do the best we can to make them more accurate, wherever that leads. Like I said, I really found this book an enjoyable read and only in the last couple of chapters do I have serious reservations about the arguments Alioto endorses.
Especially up to quantum mechanics, I found the book's analysis insightful and useful. It covers from ancient Egypt all the way to the modern ideas of science in the 1980-1990s. Even with such a broad array of topics, Alioto writes in a compelling way with good analysis of how society influenced and was influenced by science (or its "equivalent" of the time).
Having said that, his interpretations of quantum mechanics are far too radical in my opinion. (For what it's worth I've taken and passed graduate level quantum mechanics courses as a physics graduate student). He takes quantum physics to imply that there must be an observer, while more modern quantum books tend to not strongly display this quality, because it isn't so obvious it is a necessary part of the theory. (For example Everett many-worlds doesn't require anything special of the observer, which Alioto even admits at one point). Lastly, his epilogue compares modern science to a priesthood and talks about "other ways of knowing". This may be true, but he has done nothing in the book to motivate this [what does it mean to know something in a non-scientific way? Like math? But he refers to Eastern mysticism...]. It's true that science is influenced by society but I think he goes too far in society determining "truth" whatever that is.
At least the final section reminds scientists that what we often call "truth" in a model is not "Truth". We have models that seem to correspond with reality and do the best we can to make them more accurate, wherever that leads. Like I said, I really found this book an enjoyable read and only in the last couple of chapters do I have serious reservations about the arguments Alioto endorses.
April 10, 2016
I read this as part of an effort to work backwards from some narrower sociology-of-science readings to a bigger picture, and it was just what I was looking for: a broad, cohesive story that connects scientific thought to the wider cultures in which it takes place. The historical perspective in the early chapters seemed a little stronger than in the later ones, but I suppose that makes sense. The chapters on 20th-century physics might have also got bogged down in technical details a little. But I'd highly recommend this book as a starting point on the big currents of scientific thought in the West.
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December 27, 2015Source: Dr Martin
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews