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The Science Before Science: A Guide to Thinking in the 21st Century

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Dr. Rizzi's book is beautifully written and of profound importance for our culture. Currently, we are mired in a crisis of truth. People generally reject the notion of objective moral truth, in favor of a nihilistic relativism. Scientists, in principle, but not in practice, also tend to reject the certainty of truth in their own specific fields. No one seems to be sure of what they know, and many doubt that a person can know anything absolutely. This is the consequence, Rizzi says, of poor philosophical formation at the most basic levels of common sense.

Dr. Rizzi is not only a brilliant phyisicist, but also an outstanding philosopher. His book gives us the philosophical tools which help us answer these questions, tools which help us to see clearly that we can know truth, objectively. He dispells the myth relativism as it appears in all fields of science, from morality and ethics to physics.

I would also add that his book is written in such a way that it is very accessible to general audiences. I recommend it highly.

Science before science really gets back to how poor philosophy and simple philosophical mistakes can take an advanced scientist away from reality. Dr. Rizzi illuminates on how our culture is so scientifically advanced yet we miss out on basic wisdom.
This book is written for the basic reader--it can be followed by anyone with a high school education. Yet this book leads itself to multiple readings to deepen one's understanding of good philosophy. The myth about the backward ancients is nicely refuted and at the same time modern science is affirmed. This is a needed treatise on this integration. This author draws upon Gilson, Maritain, Aquinas, Aristotle, Adler--realist philosophers who have broad perspectives. It is refreshing to learn how to refute skepticism and idealism and get to the Real. This perspective is the misssing element in science and it is good to find a way to eliminate the supposed war between science and philosophy. This is a must read for all scientists who deep down want the truth in all its deep manifestations.

Dr. Anthony Rizzi's book "The Science before Science: A Guide to Thinking in the 21st Century" is a refreshing analysis of the problems of modern natural science. And it includes a solution! Dr. Rizzi gets to the bottom of one of the major issues that we have all come across in our encounters with statements from modern scientists in the press: bewildering propositions that cause us to question our ability to reason or to throw up our hands in contempt for science. For example, in a recent article, it was posited that one possible "explanation" of some aspects of modern physics is that there are copies of ourselves in an infinite number of other universes. What are we to make of this bizarre statement? We either conclude that we are completely unable to trust our reason which says "that is ridicules," or we lose confidence in science. Dr. Rizzi comes to the rescue by pointing out that we are not crazy, and modern science is internally reliable; it's just that the modern scientist has not properly translated his/her work from highly constrained theoretical conceptions to day-to-day reality. Rizzi says "they are not grounding their thinking in the basic understandings we get from a deep analysis of common experience (which Rizzi artfully does in his book) and which were so well established in classical philosophy." The solution is to reconnect philosophy with natural science. This reconnection is difficult but it is imperative in order to understand the relationship of modern scientific findings to the real world. Dr. Rizzi has both written the book and established an institute for just such an application: The Institute for Advanced Physics. The book is a "must read" for all natural scientists as well as the educated public. I recommend it highly.

Anthony Rizzi earned two degrees in physics, one from MIT and the other from Princeton University. Among his accomplishments is included the resolution of an 80-year-old problem in Einstein's theory; the first scientist to be appointed to Caltech's Laser Interferometer Gravity Wave Observatory (LIGO, LA), and founding The Institute for Advanced Physics where he also serves as the full-time director. In The Science Before Science: A Guide To Thinking In The 21st Century (which is also available in a hardcover edition (1418465038, $28.95), Rizzi maintains that there "good science" is that which expands the human mind; "bad science" is that which confuses the human mind. He also points out that "good religion" confirms our nature while "bad religion" confounds our nature. What is needed is a combination of good science and good religion if we are to achieve a true and expanding understanding of the universe we live in. Along the way, Rizzi addresses such unusual issues as the possibility of time travel; how a fuller science naturally leads to proofs for the existence of God; artificial intelligence, other forms of intelligence in the universe, and more. As much a treatise on the philosophy of science as it is a compilation of the nature of sound inquiry whether it be in the fields of physics or metaphysics, The Science Before Science is engaging, informed, and informative reading for all students of science, philosophy, and religion.

Having majored in Neuroscience with a year of lab experience as a research associate, I can say everything I know was represented fairly and accurately in this amazing book. The Science Before Science is packed with the best of modern science and the science before it, philosophy. Dr. Rizzi clearly lays out all the things we know before we come to do modern science, then he elucidates the incredible findings of modern science. In so doing, he demonstrates an uncanny ability to think clearly about modern science and the science before it, revealing his love(philia) of wisdom (sophia). The book is not about history, as one reviewer strangely thought; nor, as the same reviewer even more strangely thought, is it about religion. In fact, that same reviewer appears to demonstrate the modern confusion between knowledge and belief, which Dr. Rizzi lucidly deals with in the first two short chapters! Dr. Rizzi clearly points out that knowledge comes before belief, not the other way around. In fact, much of the book extols the thinking of "pagans" such as Aristotle. We need, as the book reminds us, to trace all our knowledge back to the physical world.

In reading this book one can begin to glimpse how Dr. Rizzi might, as he actually did, solve an 80 year old problem in Einstein's theory of general relativity. If that achievement and this book are any indication of things to come, I can't wait to hear more about his science... and the science before it.

Professor Rizzi's book, The Science Before Science, is a great book that gives real insight into the world of science and the world of everyday life, and how they truly belong together.

I don't agree with the preceding reviewer's (Jeremy Harris) criticism of the book. His criticism can be summarized simply as: he doesn't like the book, because it forces him to think outside his culturally imposed box. Dr. Rizzi is an accomplished physicist who clearly loves science, and it's precisely his scientific training that motivates and enables him (as he does in the book) to help others think fresh about the world.

It's clear Mr. Harris did not understand the book and his review is not surprisingly misleading in many places. For example, his selective quotations and summaries of various parts of the book can easily give false notions about the book's general sweep, intention, and clarity. Consider his treatment of Dr. Rizzi's definition of matter. He (the reviewer) quotes disconnected pieces of the book's definition (which would make any proposition hard to follow). No book can stand having key parts (let alone technical definitions) dissected out of their proper context. A deep book like this - full of little known truths, in which each part connects to the other in a beautiful tapestry - is especially vulnerable to such dissection. (The truth is that the book's definition of matter is comprehensive and accurate; in fact, the whole index and glossary is a treasury of important definitions, and puts page numbers of topics and meanings at your fingertips.)

The book helps us see that critical thinking requires some work, but it is nevertheless necessary to properly get at the reality of things, (and its rewards far outweigh the work). True and accurate definitions are part of the science before modern science, which comes before our knowledge even of atoms. After all, it is first the knowledge of things generally that spurs us on to study and explore enough to even find the atoms. (Dr. Rizzi, of course, knows atoms far better than most of us). In other words, we must know (as Dr. Rizzi says) things are there before we can discover clearly what they are. This is a point Dr. Rizzi brings home with special clarity.

A key point of the book is that one must philosophize. Even when we don't realize it, we philosophize. As Dr. Rizzi points out, even arguments we use in ordinary life are philosophy. You may call such simple thinking something else if you don't like the word philosophy; however, that doesn't cease to make it what Aristotle and most other ancients and most moderns would call philosophy. Whatever you call it, it is upon such simple thinking that all else we do will stand, including modern science, and reviews of books.

What can you say about a book that reunites the everyday experience of our lives of our common sense and reasonable observations with the sometimes jarringly unlikely claims of some scientists about the nature of reality.

Does the great 'relative' distance from electrons to protons really mean that everything in the universe is really mostly just a vast meaningless near emptiness? More likely Rizzi says is that the scientist forget his real life sized self conducting a real lifesized experiment with real-life sized equipment?

"Possible universes" emerging when you observe a particle for momentum rather than location? Bizarre. No thank you, it's time for a few weeks of vacation and don't bring the calculator! Such errors in interpretation of data follow when your guiding philosophical common-sense principles get forgotten while a scientist is emerged in remote calculations. Do equations really fully 'explain' things like motion, matter? Er, no. Materialism has no basis in science.

What about the spiritual, free will, the intellect...just atoms banging into each other randomly? A quarkfest? An old idea, that misses something remarkable about the difference between sensing and knowing. Rizzi's insights are exciting.

Isn't it possible and maybe even very likely that God brings about creation at the quantum level? This level transcends our means to know exactly but reduces us to probabilities or "chance"? Isn't 'chance' just another way of saying ' I've reached the limit of my ability to know this particular matter exactly and am reduced to probable results.' Nature transcends our ability to completely know it scientifically.

Dr Rizzi clarifies this sometimes confused and conflicted world of science where mere mathematical calculations are too readily given ontological status as if the numbers explained themselves. They don't.

It is the real world of experience and sound starting principles, the science before science, that allows human intelligence to follow faithfully in its scientific and metaphysical journey.

If you have kids, you will love this book, for it provides a coherent intellectual apprehension of reality, a universe not stripped of all that is finest in the human and divine. Rather consider how God might operate in evolution as the efficient cause in a universe that has led to consciousness and intelligence. Good science, good philosophy, good foundations for an integrated religious sense of the wonder of being.

One doesn't have to accept the type of intelligent design theory like that recently argued in a Pennsylvania court to show how God can and likely does operate in his creation and evolution in ways that are of course consistent with the valuable insights of good science. Intelligent Design is so obvious in things that one is naturally and reasonably religious.

What Dr Rizzi does is give us the way to integrate it all, God and the world of experience and the good science that should flow naturally from sound philosophical guiding principles. We can avoid 17th century errors of arbitray materialism and blinding idealism that still afflict the scientific and philosophical enterprise.

You owe it to yourself to get this book for yourself and those you care about. It is a true and faithful guide to thinking in the 21st century and as another reviewer pointed out, it is geared to include a wide readership from high-schoolers to Phd's.

You'll love this unique book and be very, very happy you bought it.

After having read William Wallace's excellent The Modeling of Nature: Philosophy of Science and Philosophy of Nature in Synthesis and other solid philosophy of science and physics books, I thought I knew everything there is to know on this subject, but Dr. Rizzi's book has proven me wrong--very wrong! I love it! His style and his precision in identifying what he calls "intellectual malaise" is truly a breath of fresh air for me, a beginning graduate student in physics who has struggled with some of his same early questions and doubts about the whole scientific endeavor itself, like: Is science being conducted properly? What are its aims? What are its limitations? How does science accord with commonsense and reason? Why is science so seemingly disconnected with reality at times? Is subjectivism ingrained into modern science? Etc. etc.

If you have a science background and need an excellent cure to your "intellectual malaise," read Rizzi. He's good. I think it's even better than Dr. Barr's Modern Physics and Ancient Faith, which is a good book, but its audience seems to be more the general public.

To address some misunderstandings and prejudices some reviewers seem to be bringing to Rizzi's book, please read the following that I've written to address them:

I am curious, disappointed SBS readers, what you think of the writings of the early 20th century French thermodynamicist, historian, and philosopher of physics Pierre Duhem, e.g., his The Aim and Structure of Physical Theory, The Evolution of Mechanics, and Mixture and Chemical Combination (Le mixte). Duhem argues that modern physics "saves the phenomena" rather than metaphysically explains matter. Physical theory asymptotically approaches over time a "natural classification" of empirical laws. Modern physics is prior to metaphysics (metascience) in the order of our knowing; the natural sciences are the foundation for metaphysics (cf. this: http://bit.ly/tyAnqd ).

Consequently, in Le mixte, Duhem wrote:
"Current physics tends to recover a certain form of peripateticism" [i.e., Aristotelianism]. (P. Duhem, Le mixte).

Duhem also wrote in Le mixte:
"Contemporary physics, too, puts an exact logical analysis of the notions furnished by experience at the foundations of all theory. It endeavours by such analysis not only to mark with precision the essential elements that compose each of these notions but also to meticulously eliminate all parasitic elements that mechanical hypotheses have gradually introduced."
"Little by little, however, by the very effect of this development, mechanical hypotheses came up against obstacles on all sides which were more and more numerous and difficult to surmount. The atomic, Cartesian, and Newtonian systems gradually lost favour with physicists and made way for methods analogous to those advocated by Aristotle. Present-day physics is tending to return to a peripatetic form." (P. Duhem, Le mixte).

The Nobel Prize-winning quantum physics co-inventor Werner Heisenberg corroborates in his Physics and Philosophy (online for free here: http://bit.ly/A7WvRx ) what Duhem wrote. Heisenberg said that the probability wave concept in quantum mechanics "was a quantitative version of the concept of 'potentia' in Aristotelian philosophy" (p. 41) and that the "concept of the soul for instance in the philosophy of Thomas Aquinas was more natural and less forced than the Cartesian concept of 'res cogitans,' even if we are convinced that the laws of physics and chemistry are strictly valid in living organisms." (p. 80).

Also, Rizzi certainly does not "undervalue and misjudge his own profession," as one reviewer here says. If he did, he certainly wouldn't have published his book. He in fact judges modern physics correctly because he identifies its methodological limits and realizes that modern physics is not metaphysics (cf. "Physics & Metaphysics" by Duhem: http://bit.ly/wTiUaY ). Rizzi's proposal is a return to the senses, from which all intellectual knowledge originates, as Thomas Aquinas wrote in his Summa 1.84.8c (http://bit.ly/yBSm0z ):

"The aim of natural science is that which appears primarily in sense perception ... for the natural scientist does not seek to know the nature of a stone or of a horse except in order to know the reasons of those things which are perceived by sense. For it is clear that there cannot be a perfect judgment ... of natural science concerning natural things if sensible things are ignored."

If String Theory ignores sensible things (is not experimentally verifiable), then how would that help us advance our knowledge of physical matter?

Lastly, this article explains more where Rizzi is coming from intellectually: http://bit.ly/wiY1ua
See also this page of resources: http://bit.ly/fKgNz1

Anthony Rizzi wrote THE SCIENCE BEFORE SCIENCE which was published in 2004. This book is complex and requires careful reading. Yet, the book is facinating and is clearly written. Those whose knowledge of science, especially physics, and those who are not physicists can appreciate this book. The Institute for Advanced Physics promoted and published book which has been praised by scientists and philosophers. Readers should note that Ancient and Medieval philosophers dealt with metaphysics, ontology, mathematics, and science. In other words, reality and concepts were not as separated as they are in the 21st. century.

Rizzi began this book with the fact that men cannot know everything in spite of what shallow minded populizers claim. For example, Aristotle (384-322 BC) was highly respected by the Medieval Scholastics including St. Thomas Aquinas (115-1274) and Aguinas' great teacher, St. Albertus Magnus (1193-1280).Both men praised Aristotle's work, but both men demonstrated that not all of Aristotle's conclusions were true. During the 20th. century, Albert Einstein (1879-1955)also stated that men cannot know everything.

Rizzzi stated that men must conform their thiinking to reality and that men cannot make reality conform to their ideas and thinking. Rizzi used Kant (1720-1803) as someone who tried to make this point when Kant stated that the impossibility of more than seven planets in the solar system. Yet, astronomical studies proved such a conclusion in error. Bascially Rizzi argued that the more men know, the more men realize what they do not know. Rizzi stated that Ultimate Reality, whatever that is, is too rich to be completely accurately described.

While Rizzi claimed that knowledge is first acquired via the senses, he was clear that not all knowledge was "sensorial." Senses lead to abstract thought (ideas and concepts), and concepts and ideas are realities that cannot be quantified. One example Rizzi used is that of a triangle which requires three lines or sides. A triangle cannot have two sides and still be thought of as a triangle. Rizzi's emphasis on abstract thought dealt with animal life. When some people experimented with apes, Rizzi argued the apes did not engage in sbsract thought but "aped" their trainers (pardon the play on words).

Rizzi provided text and useful diagrams to trace the process of thought. Rizzi used models of physical reality, mathematical thought, and metaphysics. Metaphysics deals with what Rizzi called Being as Being. One of the abstract areas of thought that Rizzi treated was the study of Ethics which he said was the study of what we should do and why. Rizzi disagreed with the materialists in that moral codes, values, etc. are beyond mathematical models and equations. As Rizzi stated, mathematics is the absract study of quantification and nothing else.

Rizzi had interesting comments on energy, light, atomic structure, etc. 20th. century physicists debated whether light confomred to a wave theory or a particle beam theory. As far as the undersigned knows, this debate has not been completely resolved. Rizzi also made effective use of Einstein's suggestion that time and space made physics more "relative" than previously thought.

Rizzi then ventured into the realm of philosophy and theology and their relationship with modern physics and other sciences. Rizzi cited Philoponus (490-570)who disagreed with many of the Ancients that celestial bodies were gods or "angels." Philoponus offered the view that God the Creator set celestial bodies in motion which was a theme of the Medieval Scholastics. One of the debates among the Medieval Scholastics was whether the Cosmos was eternal or had a creative beginning. Rizzi dealt effectively with the complexity of this debate. He cited St. Thomas Aquinas' proofs of God as Creator. For example, Aquinas used Ariistotle's phrase of an Unmoved Mover. Aquinas also used the phrase of the Uncaused Cause for the Cosmos and Being. Aquinas then used the phrase of the First Intelligence. If there is some order to the Cosmos, Aquinas referred to the phrase of the First Order for a definition of God or Supreme Being. In other words the debate was whether the Cosmos was created Ex Nihilo (from nothing).

When Hubble observed the expansion of the Universe by measuring what is known as the Red Shift, Aquinas's concepts gain acceptence from some astronomers and physicists. The Big Bang Theory suggested a Creator. An interesting anecdote was the work of Father Lemaitre (1894-1966)who produced a mathematical model of an expanding universe. As the undersinged mentioned elsewhere, Einstein first rejected Lemaitre's work as brilliant mathematics but bad science. However, when Einstein read Hubble's work, Einstein was gracious enough to admit that Father Lemaitre was right after all.

This review is not intended to convince anyone to accept the basic premises of the book. The review is written to suggest to thoughtful men and women that religious and non-religious men and women can intelligently discuss science, theology, philosphy, etc. and learn from each other. Companion books that may interest readers are titled CREATION AND EVOLUTION and Cardinal Schonborn's book titled CHANCE OR PURPOSE. Father Duffy's great book titled QUEEN OF THE SCIENCES deals with some of the topics of THE SCIENCE BEFORE SCIENCE and comments in this review. Father Jaki's (1924-2009)work also merits careful reading. Thoughtful people should read and carefully the book titled THE SCIENCE BEFORE SCIENCE.

James E. Egolf
March 4, 2010

It must be stated that one needs to acquire a certain way of thinking (or perhaps tap into a prior unused part of the brain) to follow the scenic route Anthony Rizzi takes you on the way to wisdom. Once you've got the hang of it, it is a singular experience. The book explains a lot (if not all), but foremost why nobody, including scientists and students alike, shouldn't confuse the hardware with the software. Brilliant stuff!