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Show HN: My Book Review of Steven Weinberg's 'To Explain the World'
- benbreen 11y agoI know it's not a typical Show HN, but I'll be available to answer questions and/or debate the merits of the recent histories of science by both Weinberg and David Wootton if anyone is interested. A bit of background: I'm an historian of science and medicine who was asked to review the physicist Steven Weinberg's recent book alongside another one by David Wootton ('The Invention of Science') which has also gotten a lot of attention. I actually enjoyed Weinberg's book quite a bit, especially his commitment to getting the technical details right, but I found the overarching picture it gives of the history of science to be unpersuasive for reasons which hopefully are made clear in the article. But in brief, I think that despite taking Aristotle to task for turning nature into a teleology, he falls into the trap of doing the same thing to human history, making scientific discovery seem less messy and improvised than it really was/is. Perhaps because by the time he was the one doing the discovering, science really had become much more regimented and systematic. The larger debate here is the famous one developed by Herbert Butterfield and later by Thomas Kuhn about the relative merits of the "Whig" (or "presentist") approach to the history of science. Here's Steven Weinberg's New York Review of Books article for background on his basic approach to the history of science: http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2015/12/17/eye-present-whig-history-science/ http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2015/12/17/eye-present-whig-...