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    To Explain the World: The Discovery of Modern Science
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    To Explain the World: The Discovery of Modern Science
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    To Explain the World: The Discovery of Modern Science
    Ebook607 pages8 hours

    To Explain the World: The Discovery of Modern Science

    By Steven Weinberg

    3.5/5

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    About this ebook

    A masterful commentary on the history of science from the Greeks to modern times, by Nobel Prize-winning physicist Steven Weinberg—a thought-provoking and important book by one of the most distinguished scientists and intellectuals of our time.

    In this rich, irreverent, and compelling history, Nobel Prize-winning physicist Steven Weinberg takes us across centuries from ancient Miletus to medieval Baghdad and Oxford, from Plato’s Academy and the Museum of Alexandria to the cathedral school of Chartres and the Royal Society of London. He shows that the scientists of ancient and medieval times not only did not understand what we understand about the world—they did not understand what there is to understand, or how to understand it. Yet over the centuries, through the struggle to solve such mysteries as the curious backward movement of the planets and the rise and fall of the tides, the modern discipline of science eventually emerged. Along the way, Weinberg examines historic clashes and collaborations between science and the competing spheres of religion, technology, poetry, mathematics, and philosophy.

    An illuminating exploration of the way we consider and analyze the world around us, To Explain the World is a sweeping, ambitious account of how difficult it was to discover the goals and methods of modern science, and the impact of this discovery on human knowledge and development.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarperCollins
    Release dateFeb 17, 2015
    ISBN9780062346674
    Author

    Steven Weinberg

    Steven Weinberg writes and illustrates kids' books about dinosaurs, roller coasters, beards, and chainsaws. He lives in the Catskills in New York.

    Read more from Steven Weinberg

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    Reviews for To Explain the World

    3.5/5

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    • 5/5
      There was a lot about Greek "scientists", who are not nearly as quotable as the scientists in "The Invention of Science". But there is also an enormous appendix of technical notes which give a mathematical presentation of many of problems discussed in the main part of the book. These are fun if you like mathematics. They are quite unusual too, and indicate a lot of application on the part of the author. Five stars for effort!
    • 3/5
      This book is not for everyone, but if you want details on the dizzying array of spheres, circles, epicycles and whatnot that people have used over the last 2,500 years or so to to try to explain celestial motion, this book has them--often in excruciatingly painful detail. It often reads like an incredibly dull textbook. The basic point that Weinberg is making here is that our ancestors did not approach questions about the universe the way we do today. It may seem absurd, possibly even insane to us today, but the idea that learning about the world involved close, careful, detailed, and methodical investigation of actual physical reality didn't seem to occur to them. From early Greek philosophers to about the time of Galileo two thousand years later, men (almost all were male) largely based their theories of how the world worked on cultural traditions, authority, unsubstantiated assumptions, or brutally enforced religious dogma. They often went through a lot of Rube Goldberg-like mental contortions to force the observations they did make to fit those preconceived notions. Weinberg is making a valid and important point. Humans did not always have a scientific, rational way of thinking, but I can't help believing it could have been made via a more readable book. He doesn't attempt to offer a reason for how or why our scientific way of thinking came about, and just saying that it's a sign of our species maturing doesn't really explain it, but we have learned how to learn, and that's an important step.
    • 5/5
      The author is a Nobel laureate physicist who teaches at the University of Texas at Austin. He is also a very cogent explicator of difficult scientific concepts. In this book, he tackles the history of the modern scientific method of thinking from the ancient Greeks through the scientific revolution of the 17th century. In doing so, he emphasizes astronomy and physics, the fields that exhibited the ideas that most rocked the way men viewed the universe and man’s place in it, at least until Darwin came along.The book covers well traveled ground in the history of science, but with a working scientist’s viewpoint. He unabashedly judges the intellectual stars of the past through modern eyes. Consequently, Plato, Francis Bacon, and Rene Descartes come out looking rather inconsequential, whereas Galileo and Newton appear truly heroic. This book can be read on two very different levels. The first 267 pages follow the tried and true formula of popularizing scientists by avoiding equations. However, Weinberg allows the serious scientist or mathematically literate reader a view of what the ancient thinkers were really doing in his 100 pages of “Technical Notes.” There, he actually shows how to calculate the value of pi, the geometry of diurnal parallax, the trigonometry of Kepler’s elliptical motion of the planets, the least-time derivation of the law of refraction, and the calculus of Newton’s dynamics, among other arcana. Evaluation: I highly recommend this book to anyone interested in how our current view of the cosmos came about.(JAB)
    • 4/5
      Confession time: I studied history at university and one of the first thing I learned - you can’t judge the past by the present for a whole lot of reasons not least of which is that they didn’t have the same access as us to, well, history. Which brings me to the recent book by Nobel Prize winning theoretical physicist Steven Weinberg, To Explain the World. Weinberg isn’t an historian and feels no need to follow this rule. In fact, he rejects it out of hand which meant at least to me once I got over the shock of his approach some rather unorthodox but still interesting thoughts on the history of science. Take for instance his views on Aristotle versus Plato:“I confess that I find Aristotle frequently tedious, in a way that Plato is not but although often wrong Aristotle is not silly, in the way that Plato sometimes is.”He begins his foray into the history of science in classical Greece. He feels the early Greek philosophers were arrogant and smug in their ruminations about science while lacking any proper methodology or, to be precise, any methodology. To make matters worse, they were almost invariably wrong even about things they could have easily verified if they tried doing some real work outside of their heads. He is more impressed with the Hellenistic Greeks who actually developed methods to calculate such things as the size of the earth and were surprisingly accurate in their calculations. After Greece, he looks at other non-western countries only as they influenced western thought and even then pretty much dismisses any contribution by them to science. The one exception to this is the Arab scientists who made some very important scientific advances. His main concern, however, remains the west and he has some interesting views on many of the thinkers who are often seen as the precursors of modern science. For example, he admires Galileo and Isaac Newton despite some of their more wacky theories but he clearly thinks Descartes gets way too much praise for his contributions to science. He also limits his ruminations to pre-Enlightenment and to physics and astronomy. One thing I learned way back in those halcyon university days: all history has biases if only in the facts an historian chooses to look at and regardless of whether I agree with his tendency to make judgmental statements about his subjects and their lack of real scientific methods, it certainly made for some interesting reading. Admittedly, I am not a scientist although I find it intriguing but it’s hard to study any history without encountering science eg Newton, not Luther, is considered by many historians as the beginning of Early Modernity. I will also admit I didn’t always understand the science as Weinberg laid it out, especially the astronomy. But, despite his unorthodox approach to history and my lack of knowledge on the subject, it was definitely fascinating and more than a little enlightening to read a history of science written by a scientist.