When We Cease To Understand The World is history of chemistry, astrophysics, mathematics personalities. I could go into what he says, but just read the book. He's supposed written two novels, and this is non-fiction.
That got me thinking about philosophy of science. I read The Logic of Scientific Revolutions. It's hard to overthrow the dominant paradigms, probably every new person on the block wants to overthrow the paradigm. But to really overthrow it, there has to be something of benefit and a fight. One of the reasons I didn't really go to graduate school in philosophy was that there wasn't a paradigm I wanted to defend or overthrow. And nobody thought I was brilliant, encouraged me. My father was a logic scholar, and worked with Nicholas Rescher. I think that's his name. I'm not going to google it now.
When I did a year abroad at the University of Warwick I studied with David Miller, who was a discipline of Karl Popper, and his stuff. A good scientist looks for falsification, not just confirmation. Indiction can't work. The open society is vulnerable.
Now I'd say this was a 3rd classic book in philosophy and history of science. I'm reading about this mathematician Grothendieck, who went nuts, and became like Milarepa and lived like a recluse, after becoming an environmental nut, and formed a commune, did all kinds of unconventional things. In a way I identified with his crisis.
Really fascinating book, I highly recommend it, and it's short, and I've only read about half of it.
The 4th history of science book I liked as Medical Muses: Hysteria in Nineteenth-Century Paris by Asti Hustvedt. Really good history on Martin Charcot.
Links about the book:
Comments
Post a Comment