115 of 132 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
A Four Hundred Page Hissy-Fit, October 27, 2009
This review is from: Science: A Four Thousand Year History (Hardcover)
Here is a detailed critique from Norman Levitt, in Skeptic Magazine:
Science: A Four Hundred Page Hissy-Fit
by Norman J. Levitt
Imagine a biography of Mozart grimly intent on debunking its subject. It points out that he had an unhealthy interest in scatological jokes, demeaned women in Cosi fan tutte, black men in Die Zauberflote and poor peasants in Don Giovanni. He was a spendthrift and preyed on his friends' generosity, while thinking himself superior to any of his fellow-musicians. He garnered praise and glory in Vienna while leaving his equally talented sister to languish in the provinces as their father's housekeeper. He exploited the underpaid talents of performing musicians, copyists, and a host of other menials to realize his work and put it before the wealthy public. He curried the favor of a decadent hereditary nobility in a crumbling and oppressive empire. Furthermore, he borrowed a lot of his themes from folk-music without acknowledgment. To think of him as a singular genius, then, is obviously wrongheaded, since practically anyone can whistle or hum a tune and even improvise on it without depending on his examples. He is cited shamelessly by the reigning elite as a prime example of western cultural superiority in an attempt to intimidate the masses and to justify the continuing hegemony of capitalist high culture. However, we oughtn't to patronize those ordinary people who prefer hip-hop to Mozart; they're just embracing unorthodox (by upper-class standards) but equally valid esthetic values. In sum, there's no reason whatever to idolize Mozart, and we ought to cast a suspicious eye on those who do.
Mutatis mutandis, the British historian of science Patricia Fara has written a book that treats its own vast subject -- science and the history of its development -- in a similarly contemptuous and condescending way. Fara's case reposes on the twin shaky pillars of epistemological relativism and self-ascribed political righteousness. It is outlandishly Pecksniffian in tone and substance. She has an appallingly cavalier attitude toward evidence and documentation. She argues by means of flat assertion and unsupported generalization, sins, one assumes, she would never let her callowest undergraduates get away with. When I read a book, however closely, my marginal notations are usually brief and infrequent. Not so in the case of Science: A Four Thousand Year History; my copy is crammed with notes to myself, most of them pointing out the author's grotesque gaffes. Imprecision reigns on every page; inaccuracies, irrelevancies, omissions, anachronisms, errors, and outright howlers go galumphing through the text with the author's blithe acquiescence. Here I group the conceptual defects thematically.
Science in Alien Cultures
Fara begins her book with an attempt to show that science is not a western European monopoly; rather, she claims, societies built on vastly different cultures than our own have devised ways to systematize knowledge, some of which are echoed in our own scientific practice, while others strike off in different philosophical and methodological directions. She surveys the scientific and technological achievements of Babylon, China, and the Islamic World (Arab and Persian). Given her aim of showing some kind of parity of ancient and modern peoples in respect to epistemic dignity, there are some surprising omissions here. Egypt is not mentioned, nor Rome, with its audacious engineering. The pre-Columbian cultures of the western hemisphere go unmentioned as well, notwithstanding the mathematical, astronomical, and calendrical accomplishments of the Maya, the architectural splendors of Teotihuacan and Tenochtitlan, and the unsurpassed craftsmanship of the Inca. Worst of all, India is entirely ignored, despite the well-known fact that decimal arithmetic and the notion of zero were discovered there before spreading to Islamic and Christian civilizations, and despite the more profound, if lesser-known fact, that the mathematical culture of India was the deepest and most insightful in the world before the Renaissance took hold in Europe.
Even the societies that command Fara's attention are treated superficially and with little attention to vital detail. The most stunning mathematical achievement of the Babylonians (so far as we know) is the compilation of tables of Pythagorean triples of integers, which suggests some kind of acquaintance with the Pythagorean theorem, at least empirically. Fara ignores it. The enormous technological ingenuity of China in the first millennium AD is sketchily alluded to, but without any clear idea of how China may have conceptualized the principles that its technology implemented. Moreover, the mathematical learning of Chinese adepts -- deeper and more incisive than is generally recognized -- is simply ignored. Islamic scientific culture is praised, but in a vague and approximate way that gives the reader no real grasp of what it actually accomplished in mathematics, physics, and astronomy.
When it comes to Greece -- Hellenic and Hellenistic science -- Fara's tone changes altogether, since Greece in the conventional view stands godfather to post-medieval western culture, and therefore must be viewed as tainted. Fara's basic method is to throw around a few well-known names, but with a dismissive agenda clearly delineated. The most stunning of Greek intellectual achievements, the invention of the axiomatic method and synthetic geometry for example, goes completely unmentioned. The name of the possibly mythical sage Pythagoras gets thrown about at some length, but without any account of the famous theorem nor of the even more stunning discovery, still resonant in contemporary debates over the nature of mathematical entities, of the irrationality of '2, a discovery ascribed, rightly or not, to the Pythagorean school (but in any case Greek). Plato's cosmology, expounded in the Timaeus, and the source of the designation "Platonic" for the five regular solids, is also absent, despite its notable attempt at constructing a version of chemistry.
Worst of all, however, is the treatment of the great Archimedes, so far as we know the most powerful intellect of the pre-modern world. Saith Fara, "Archimedes was neither a scientist nor a technologist, since no such people existed when he was living in Sicily during the third century BCE." This exhibits a rather witless eagerness to confuse nomenclature with reality. Archimedes is characterized as more concerned with "ingenious gadgets that would demonstrate mathematical principles" than with practical engineering. This rather perversely ignores his well-attested fame as a military engineer of matchless ingenuity. But even if we ignore this point, we are still left with an (all too brief) account of Archimedes that tells us nothing whatever of what this greatest of ancient mathematicians and physicists actually achieved: the "method of exhaustion," anticipating modern notions of limit and infinite series and applied to the computation of geometric quantities; the calculation of the volume and surface area of the sphere and many other geometric objects; a precise method for approximating ', a deep understanding of leverage, buoyancy and the optics of mirrors, etc. Fara doesn't deign to discuss any of this. Why?
I conclude that two things haunt and terrify Fara. One is mathematics; over and over, she evades having to deal with mathematical ideas, the very core of scientific progress. I shall mention several more examples below. But even more unacceptable is the very notion of genius (without which it is impossible to talk sensibly about Archimedes, inter alia). She seems to regard the very idea of genius as an imposture, a myth designed to cow the ordinary run of humanity, especially women, workers, and non-westerners. By contrast, the book is full of feminist sniping that exalts relatively minor and marginal figures in the history of science, while one could compile an extensive list (I have done so) of notable geniuses who go unmentioned or are referred to in a scant sentence or two.
Invisible Geniuses
Most notably, one key figure seems to be missing from this account: Sir Isaac Newton. "Although Newton was undoubtedly a brilliant man, eulogies of a lone genius fail to match events," claims Fara. A previous book of hers, Newton: The Making of a Genius, has an ironic title: the point is that Newton, as we now conceive of him, was the product of a long and unremitting campaign of cultural propaganda designed to demonstrate the unassailable superiority of British and western learning. Fara's assertions are all too easy to prove if one resorts to the simple strategy of systematically ignoring what Newton did and how he did it.
The image of Newton as a solitary and isolated figure is all too well-attested anecdotally to be reasonably challenged. As to his being a genius by any definition, we have the evidence, not only of the invention of the calculus and the grand synthesis of Principia Mathematica, but of his dazzling array of other mathematical and scientific breakthroughs, for instance, his work on the characterization of algebraic curves in the plane, his method for counting and determining the roots of arbitrary functions, his investigations of infinite series, and his solution in a scant few hours of the brachistichrone problem, which had taken Leibniz six months to crack.
Also absent is any account of Newton's achievement in optics -- his analysis of the compound nature of light and his invention of the reflecting telescope (the original instrument was built with his own hands). Fara doesn't give us even the briefest account of the chronology, let alone the intellectual content, of these achievements. There is nothing about Newton's relations with his teacher Isaac...
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33 of 39 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
Dr. Fara tries to answer "How has science come to dominate modern society?, February 21, 2010
This review is from: Science: A Four Thousand Year History (Hardcover)
When your book is entitled "Science - A Four thousand Year History", you better know your stuff and know it well. A large subject. Dr. Norman J. Levitt's critique in skeptic magazine pretty much sums it up.
Dr. Levitt is 100% absolutely spot on when he writes, "Imprecision reigns on every page; inaccuracies, irrelevancies, omissions, anachronisms, errors, and outright howlers go galumphing through the text with the author's blithe acquiescence"
and Dr. Levitt finishes by stating.....
"To put it impudently and without any leavening of charity, what in the world is a meager scholar like Fara doing on Newton's home turf, Cambridge?"
Wow. Yes, that just happened and Dr. Levitt wrote that...
Skip this sloppy history/science book...and pick up Bill Bryson's, A Short History of Nearly Everything.
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5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Good Idea, Monumental Failure in Execution, February 3, 2011
Fara's framework for this book, and intended mode of developing it was great. The problem is that the actual fleshing out is horrendous. Fara's concept seems to be to draw an outline of the history of science that is done by way of essays. Nearly all sections of her romp through history of science are 3-5 pages, which would make it a nice reference book, on top of a nice front-to-back read, but the essays are horrible in writing, material chosen and organization. In attempting to adehere to principles that maintain that science is a universal (global) phenomenon, possessing a nebulous definition of what science really is, she really loses perspective of the central subject, that is, science. I challenge anyone to randomly crack into this book, read the essay, and then tally how many bits of information you get about science versus something that is not science. I assure you, each essay talks more about context (or something having nothing to do with science) than anything that can be remotely considered "science." Now, context is not bad, but Fara fails to make further references to why the context is important to the science or scientists. (note:I was anticipating the goal of this book to be the association of such a context with the history of science.) If You would like to read about the times of, say Kepler, you would be better served in reading a book on the years in which that person lived.
I read each section of this book, thinking, "What does any of this have to do with the title of the section?" At times, Fara makes more references to comparative literature of the times than she does to the science and scientists. At other times, I feel as though this book is a nothing more than a published set of notes, because it seems so chaotic in its assortment. The book never develops a flow.
I think the most disconcerting thing about this book is it seems very confused in its intended audience. It is far too complicated for the layman, making subtle references to ideas that a scholar would know. On the other hand, if the book was intended for scholars of the history of science, then it is banal, pedestrian, and its existence is superfluous, as it suits no needs of the scholar in HPS. I am also concerned that some of the points made throughout are not entirely correct, either lacking in complete explication or simply incorrect.
On the positive side, there were a dozen bits of useful information that I took away from this work, but that is not much for nearly 400 pages of reading.
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