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12 of 12 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Applied Heisenberg, or, Uncertainty 101, March 10, 2005
This review is from: The Common Sense of Science (Harvard Paperbacks) (Paperback)
First of all, James McCall is right about one of the purposes of this book: to discuss how, in fact, nearly every action we take has a scientific basis in that we have learned from our previous experiences and, following any action we take, we will then evaluate the consequences and adjust our future actions accordingly, even if all this analysis is done unconsciously.
But this discussion is fully developed in only the last one-quarter to one-third of the book. In its entirety, The Common Sense of Science is looking at three critical steps in the development of science and scientific thinking: first, the union of logic and observation where the two had been separate and distinct activities; second, the rise of a new attitude about investigating the world: cause and effect; and, third and where we find ourselves today, the establishment of statistics and uncertainly as the criteria for developing new theories about how the world, and, indeed, the universe work.
A long time ago, a friend of mine who was a physics student explained uncertainty to me this way: if you know how fast something is going, you don't know where it is, and if you know where it is, you don't know how fast it's going. This is, of course, an oversimplification, but it serves to demonstrate a critical point of Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle: that observations, by definition, are not static, that the observer is part of the phenomenon he or she observes.
In addressing these three issues (the union of logic and observation, cause and effect, and uncertainty), Bronowski has given us a broad and deeply thoughtful analysis of the three most critical steps in the history of science. Although the book was written in 1951, its discussion is as pertinent today as the day it was written. And that may be one of the problems that intimidate most non-scientists about science. Because, in fact, we are still getting used to the idea of science as something that is, by definition, uncertain and what Einstein would call, "a local phenomenon" in terms of both time and space. That is, the old safe and comforting certainty has gone out of science, the kind of certainty that says, yes, smoking causes lung cancer or no, apples never fall up, and gives the exact causes why these things should be so. In fact, we know that smoking does not always cause lung cancer (or at least not in the time frame we're working with here on Earth). It might eventually cause lung cancer in everyone who smoked if they lived long enough, but we don't know what "long enough" is and, in the meantime, we're stuck with the current lifespan. That's Einstein's "local phenomenon." Instead of certainty and cause-and-effect, we now have to make do with correlation and probability, and that is not nearly as comforting as certainty.
But the real core of The Common Sense of Science is the development of scientific thinking from the original point of reasoning without observation, to reasoning based on observation and the consequent development of cause-and-effect thinking, to the current reliance on statistics and uncertainty. While Bronowski spends the last two chapters dealing with the "truth and value" of scientific thinking and the degree to which, in our daily lives, we are all scientific thinkers, I think this portrait of the development of scientific thinking is the real core of the book, and its real value. It should be on everyone's Must Read list.
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15 of 16 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Sense and Sensibility, July 23, 2002
This review is from: The Common Sense of Science (Harvard Paperbacks) (Paperback)
...P>This book was written in 1951. "The Ascent of Man" was still 20 years in the future; the richly humanistic outlook of that celebrated series of programs is the same, but here Bronowski restricts himself to examining science, and putting it in the context of other sorts of mental activities that people engage in. Most of what people think about (or for that matter animals in a more rudimentary way) involves using their experiences to guide their actions, and then evaluating how well they did. "Learn from your mistakes" epitomizes much common sense. Science does the same sort of thing; what makes it difficult for people is the often technical language it is couched in, and the exactness of the conditions it specifies and predictions it calculates. Yet over time science tries to learn from its mistakes (in spite of the rearguard actions of many older scientists!) and revise its views of the world, just the way a sensible individual does. The only difference between the common sense of an individual and that of a scientist is this business of technical language and precise definition. In our ordinary lives we don't bother to define things very well, because we are talking to ourselves or a few others in our circumstances. Besides, we have only one life, and setting up controlled experiments is usually out of the question. Still, people form theories of the world that they act upon in their personal affairs, and change those theories if they don't seem to work. In this way, Bronowski insists, we are all scientists. We may believe in angels and lucky numbers, but we know that boiling an egg or shooting a basketball well or getting a good seat in the movies requires the application of our intelligence to the world. (For that matter, we may believe in angels but find that it makes more sense to depend on ourselves.) Bronowski wrote this book in 1951, in the shadow of WWII, the atomic bomb and the new and more terrible hydrogen bomb. Moreover, quantum mechanics was still quite bizarre and controversial to the mass of scientists, nor had they really absorbed the deeper message of Relativity Theory. In 1905 Einstein had shown that there is no "out there" to be studied: the observer and the observed are, and must be, intertwined; to look at something is to interact with it. The workers building up quantum mechanics absorbed this tremendous insight and added one of their own: that cause-and-effect descriptions of the world may not always be available. One should be satisfied, in the realm of the very small, with predicting a range of probable outcomes and specifying no particular underlying mechanism that controls them. This book discusses the massive shift in attitudes these two new views required of scientists. Ironically, the average layman was more used to dealing with the world in these ways: one learns about the world by participating in it, and all thought of the future must be provisional, because the world always has surprises in store. While these thoughts were penned half a century ago, the issues are still current. Also, of course, there are a myriad of newer and sexier books discussing these issues, and relating them to newer technologies and more recent science. Yet Bronowski's book is still a good authoritative read. He was a mathematician and participant in much of the intellectual ferment of the time, and knew many of the thinkers, such as Fermi and von Neumann. He is a master of the intellectual history, and this is a book that relates scientific attitudes to the cultural milieus in which they grew up. But especially, this book is worth reading because it gives a rounded picture, in rich, intelligent prose, of an issue that is of concern not merely to scientists, but to all of us.
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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Common Sense is Illuminating, January 12, 2010
This is a second run through Bronowski's little masterpiece in less than a year. I was writing a paper and wrote a sentence, but I "knew" it was from something I'd read. Googled the sentence and, presto. There isn't much to add to the already excellent reviews; I can offer as a nonscientist conducting research in cognition, Bronowski's take on the convergence/union of logic and observation and the role of uncertainty in science made this book even more informative after a second look. His observations on cause and effect and truth and value are enlighening. The book is also very quotable, for example:
"All living is action, and human living is thoughtful action." (btw, this is the quote that brought me back to the book)
"There is indeed no system of morality which does not set a high value on truth and on knowledge, above all on a conscious knowledge of oneself."
"Let us not be contemptuous of mistakes; they are the fulcrum on which the process of life moves."
"Human life is social life, and there is no science which is not part of some social science."
I bought a used original hardback, and it was once part of a high school library. While the style and content are accessible to a high school student, I wonder how much interest the book would draw today.
A great resource and highly recommended.
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