12 of 13 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A great book if you have any interest in science whatsoever!, December 30, 1999
By A Customer
When I picked this up, I didn't know what to expect, and I was pleasantly surprised. Gregory Derry writes about and explores different ideas ranging from logic to symmetry to pseudoscience, so the book covered a great range. The reading style is easy to understand, and it helps me a lot in college for my science courses and some math courses. Also, I showed it to my professor, who now uses it as a source himself. And also my little sister (aged 15) is getting a lot out of it, although admittedly she is very intelligent for her age. So it's for everybody! I now feel like I understand science better as a whole, as well as the fact that it has made me really interested in science.
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14 of 17 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
A pretty good book., May 22, 2000
If I could summarize my opinion of this book in a single word it would be "ambivalence." The book definitely has its good points, but it lacks closure on many themes, is open ended in many ways, and it's a little of order. Perhaps Derry wanted it that way because scientific progress often goes the same route. This is supposed to be an explanatory text, though, and I would have organized it differently.
The book begins with a chapter consisting of several stories from the history of science, including the discovery of the structure of Benzene and the development the Smallpox vaccine. There are five in all, and each illustrates a different application of the method of science to discovery. The one thing lacking from this chapter (and from the book, for that matter) is a cohesive summary of the principles brought out through these examples. I think Derry wanted his readers to figure it out themselves, and so he shuns summary tables and lists as a way of making the reader think. Part of the author's message is that science does not work according to a given set of rules -- the kind of rules you might have learned in grade school. Instead, Derry presents science as a more fluid construct. I agree, but telling the stories had a point, and I believe he should have been more succinct in bringing out his opinion about what the point was suppose to be, especially in relationship to the stories meant to illustrate how science works.
The next few chapters list some important methods used by scientists -- some of which are illustrated in the examples from chapter 1. For example, chapter two describes how looking for patterns in nature provides important clues in scientific exploration. Chapter three describes the importance of instrumentation in scientific work, primarily in allowing scientists to observe phenomena in which they would be otherwise unaware. Chapter four explains how sometimes small discrepancies between observation and theoretical prediction often leads to the abandonment of old theories and the development of new ones.
Chapter five is a condensed history of astronomy, from the early Greeks through Galileo and Newton (the book uses examples from many branches of science, but mostly from physics, Derry's field of expertise). This chapter brings together many of the unifying concepts in science, but (again) they must be found and understood by the reader -- the author does not deliver them point-by-point in list or table format (even in summary).
Chapter six begins the second part of the book (there are four) by describing models, modeling, and approximations. This chapter is definitely long on "how science works" and short on "what science is." Reading the chapter on models, for example, might leave the reader with the impression that truth and reality are almost irrelevant and that the objective of science is to simply develop models that predict the outcome of experiments. I agree that models are important. However, I think it's safe to say they are more important in applied science and engineering than they are in pure science, and that there is still some expectation by scientists that fundamental scientific theories somehow give us a window into the way the universe "really is."
Chapter seven is among the best, and deals with the way logic, reason, critical evaluation, and evidence are built into the scientific method. This chapter describes deductive and inductive logic, the importance of documented (and repeatable) evidence, and evaluating causality. It also has some really good stuff on bogus arguments, giving examples of half-a-dozen or more common techniques used by people to fool themselves and/or mislead others.
There is also a chapter on science and religion, as well as science and how it relates to society and ethics. Both these chapters have little to do with the book's thesis (what science is, and how it works). The chapter on science and religion, in particular, is brief and tends towards reasoning based on semantics.
Another good chapter (12) deals with pseudoscience and how to recognize it. Derry offers "claims for perpetual motion" and "creation science" as examples of pseudoscience. Unlike other examples in the book, Derry shows exactly how and why these two inventions of human imagination ought to be classified as pseudoscience, and how they are fundamentally different from modern science. Chapter 13 describes boarder-land areas like cold fusion and parapsychology. These, Derry argues, qualify as science, but (especially in the case of cold fusion) illustrate ways in which science can (and sometimes does) go awry.
The third part of the book ends with chapters 14 and 15, which deal with the philosophy of science. Here Derry actually explains the important parts of theory formation, but only briefly. Most of this chapter deals with things of a pretty philosophical nature, such as questions about what causes scientific revolutions and how we know things. The nuts and bolts of theory formation are in the chapters on modeling -- chapters that unfortunately and amazingly virtually never mention the word "theory."
The last part seems almost like a separate book, and consists of six chapters that supposedly describe unifying concepts. While I could certainly find unifying concepts in the examples, I'm not at all sure that these are the best examples. For example, one chapter describes how volume grows faster than area, which grows faster than length, and how this determines maximum sizes for some animals. Another describes the importance of symmetry in mathematics and in art. Yet another describes thermodynamics and the "arrow of time." Finishing off the list are chapters on feedback loops, linear dependence, and exponential growth.
For me, this book started out slow, but ended up being reasonably interesting. Overall I don't think it's a great book on the nature of science, but it's okay and certainly has its good points.
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