To explain the world : the discovery of modern science

by Steven Weinberg

Paper Book, 2016

Status

Available

Call number

509

Library's review

Indeholder "Preface", "I. Greek Physics", " 1. Matter and Poetry", " 2. Music and Mathematics", " 3. Motion and Philosophy", " 4. Hellenistic Physics and Technology", " 5. Ancient Science and Religion", "II. Greek Astronomy", " 6. The Uses of Astronomy", " 7. Measuring the Sun, Moon, and Earth", "
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8. The Problem of the Planets", "III. The Middle Ages", " 9. The Arabs", " 10. Medieval Europe", "IV. The Scientific Revolution", " 11. The Solar System Solved", " 12. Experiments Begun", " 13. Method Reconsidered", " 14. The Newtonian Synthesis", " 15. Epilogue: The Great Reduction", "Acknowledgments", "Technical notes", "Endnotes", "Bibliography", "Index".

Ideen er vist at forklare hvordan vi er nået til det nuværende verdensbillede, for man kan jo ikke sige at det har været et mål hele vejen. Plato, Aristoteles, Arkimedes, Ctesibius of Alexandria.
Aristarchus regner på afstand til sol og måne. Udregningerne er rigtige nok, men observationerne er helt ved siden af. Nogle få år senere regner Eratosthenes på Jordens størrelse og er heldig med at fejlene næsten udligner hinanden. Planetbevægelser går op i epicirkler og giver en sund lede overfor "overtuning". Dvs at man justerer parametre til det passer, men uden nogen ide om hvorfor det lige skulle være de parameterværdier, man bruger. Aristoteles prøver også med flere kugleskaller men hans konstruktion vil få Mars til at cirkle rundt om jorden tre gange i døgnet. Der er også et problem for man tænker sig at planeterne lyser på samme måde som Solen, men så er det umuligt at forklare at de har forskellig lysstyrke på forskellige punkter i deres bane. Heraklid indså en hel del af dette og forklarede sine elever at jorden drejede rundt om sin egen akse. Ptolomæus forbedrede Hipparchos stjernekatalog og lavede ret fine kort. Epicykler og lignende komplikationer var nødvendige fordi planetbanerne ikke var cirkler, men ellipser og banehastigheden var heller ikke konstant. Svagt interessant, men alligevel ikke. Resten af bogen om middelalder og arabisk videnskab fænger heller ikke og så er der nogle tekniske noter, hvor der er formler, men så måske ikke helt formler nok.

Jeg tror det var vigtigere for Weinberg at skrive bogen end for mig at læse den, men nu kan jeg da sige at jeg har bladret den ret grundigt.
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Publication

London : Penguin Books, 2016.

Description

"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"--Amazon.com. Presents a commentary on the history of science that examines historic clashes and collaborations between science and the competing realms of religion, technology, poetry, mathematics, and philosophy.… (more)

User reviews

LibraryThing member lostinalibrary
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
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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.
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LibraryThing member nbmars
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
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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)
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LibraryThing member fpagan
From Thales to Newton -- how things scientific (mostly things physical and things astronomical) gradually got figured out in ancient, medieval, and early modern times. Here physics Nobelist Weinberg is remarkably restrained when it comes to giving religion the condemnation it obviously deserves for
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impeding the advance of real knowledge at every step. As usual, though, he writes with great clarity and authority. And for those who are not afraid of a little math, he appends an extensive set of technical explanations.
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LibraryThing member DLMorrese
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
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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.
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LibraryThing member themulhern
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
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like mathematics. They are quite unusual too, and indicate a lot of application on the part of the author. Five stars for effort!
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Language

Original language

English

Original publication date

2015

Physical description

xiv, 416 p.; 19.6 cm

ISBN

9780141980874

Local notes

Omslag: Milan Bozic
Omslagillustration: David Bukach; Sheila Terry / Getty Images
Omslaget viser dyrekredsen med et stort øje i midten
Indskannet omslag - N650U - 150 dpi
En af Karens bøger, jeg lige lånte lidt.

Pages

xiv; 416

Library's rating

Rating

½ (47 ratings; 3.7)

DDC/MDS

509
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