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Did you know that Dr. Steven Weinberg, the author of this book, along with getting the Nobel Prize, also received the Lewis Thomas Prize for Scientist as Poet? He did. Reading some of Dr. Weinberg’s earlier writing left me with the impression that he is an intelligent fellow who is capable of looking at more than one side of an issue and is likely to arrive at conclusions that are reasonable, if not necessarily likely to garner universal agreement. Reading an excerpt from this book, I was struck by the line “As great as is the progress that has been made in the methods of science, we may today be repeating some of the errors of the past.” Uh-oh, I thought, better find out about that, I don’t want to be going all Ptolemy on anybody without realizing it. Dr. Weinberg starts off by considering what the ancient Greeks had to say about the natural world. He begins with Thales, who said “Everything is water,” which is remembered as the first physical Theory of Everything. Dr. Weinberg seems to think that this theory wasn’t too bad for a first try, but, personally, I think Heraclitus’s “Everything is fire” has more pizzazz. We then visit with Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Democritus, all bright fellows, to be sure, but, when they turned to science, “none of them attempted to verify or even . . . seriously to justify their speculations.” This point seems a bit exaggerated. Aristotle’s argument that if the Earth moved, then a ball thrown straight up in the air would not come straight down to where it was thrown, sounds to me like an attempt to support a conclusion. A kindergarten–level experiment would have sufficed to cast doubt on Aristotle’s thinking, but the classical philosophers’ method of investigation was not experimentation but discussion and argument. Philosophy was compared to a wrestling match, with the expectation that shaky ideas would be beaten down and the strongest and therefore best philosophy would come out on top. The successors to the classical Greeks, the technicians, mathematicians and scientists of the Hellenistic era, had a better handle on things. Dr. Weinberg admires Hero and thinks the world of Archimedes, but he devotes more pages to Ptolemy’s “Almagest,” which was a standard astronomy text for more than a thousand years, but today is seen as THE science botch of all time, and a lesson to us all. Dr. Weinberg then discusses Arab and European scholarship in the Middle Ages. Much of the sophistication of Greece and Rome was gone, and religious leaders felt that, if there was to be such a thing as thinking, every bit of it should be concerned with holy writ and the wisdom of the saints. Questioning was out. But there was still astronomy, needed to make the calendars that told you when it was a holy day, and astronomy kept men thinking about the natural order. And there was Aristotle, and Aristotle, for all Dr. Weinberg’s critical opinion of him, got men to thinking about thinking, and logical thinking at that. Dr. Weinberg then comes to the Scientific Revolution, which he considers as beginning with Copernicus. Galileo’s experiments on falling bodies – which demonstrated that Aristotle’s not-experiment-based ideas in this area were wrong - are Dr. Weinberg’s starting point for modern experimental science. The book that Galileo wrote about these experiments had to be smuggled out of Italy and published in London, since, by that time, the Church had arrested and tortured Galileo, forcing him to recant his teaching that the Earth moves (which, it was argued, was in conflict with a few sentences in the Old Testament that talk about the sun moving across the sky and do not say that it was the spinning of the Earth that made it appear that the sun was moving in the heavens) and sentenced him to permanent house arrest, and banned his books, and forbade him to publish anything ever again. As Darwin also could have told you, being a scientist is not for wimps. The idea of experimental science took hold: “No longer were natural philosophers relying on nature to reveal its principles to casual observers.” Experimental science was rolling along pretty well by the time Isaac Newton arrived on the scene. “Newton’s achievements provided the paradigm that all subsequent science has followed.” Newton was The Man. Dr. Weinberg’s short-list of the greatest scientists of all time reads “Galileo, Newton, Darwin, Einstein,” all world changers and earth shakers. Dr. Weinberg points out that while it is perfectly possible for a person to be both very religious and very scientific (Newton was such a one), “It was essential for the discovery of science that religious ideas be divorced from the study of nature. Once one invokes the supernatural, anything can be explained, and no explanation can be verified.” So, scientists run into trouble with established religions. Along with the church’s pounding down of Galileo, we are told about Anaxagoras, who had to flee Athens after teaching that the sun is not a god but a physical object, and Hypatia, who was literally torn to pieces by a mob of good Christians for the unforgivable crimes of being a scientist, a mathematician, and, at the same time, a woman, a pagan, and hot. Dr. Weinberg also mentions fellow Nobel Prize winner Abdus Salaam, a devout Moslem, who, when he attempted to promote scientific research in the Islamic Middle East, was told that, for the Faithful, the study of science would be “culturally corrosive.” Whether Islam would benefit from cultural corrosion of this sort I will leave to the internet’s “comment” pages. Particular pleasures: Philosophers, natural and un-, have, figuratively speaking, been beating each other over the head with inflated pig bladders since day one. It’s a tradition that Dr. Weinberg gleefully joins in this book. Aristotle takes a drubbing throughout, but the chapter in which Dr. Weinberg disrespects Francis Bacon and Rene Descartes, was, by itself, worth the price of admission. Disappointments: Dr. Weinberg never does say which errors of the past are the ones that we might be repeating today. I guess we will just have to keep our guard up and hope for the best. I had a half-formed hope that Dr. Weinberg, in this book subtitled “The Discovery of Modern Science,” would spell out just what was achieved, providing an explicit, concise, lucid, perhaps even poetic, description of, and users guide for, the scientific method, preferably one suitable for copying and pasting into every single internet discussion of evolution and global warming. Dr. Weinberg did not do this. He seems happiest with a description of science as a rudderless chaos that sometimes manages to produce results in spite of itself, or as “a tangle of deduction, induction, and guesswork.” “We learn how to do science, not by making rules about how to do science, but from the experience of doing science.” I have a tiny little small suspicion that Dr. Weinberg talks about science in this way in order to allow string theory to be classified as “science” rather than as “mathematical pastime.” But his description allows the most uninformed cranks in the universe to have as much right as anyone to claim that their conclusions are scientific, “Oh, yeah, we got a HUGE tangle of induction, deduction, reduction, convection and guesswork going on here ALL the time.” No one should be led to suppose that science is whatever you happen to think, or something indefinable and unteachable. Putting it into practice requires discipline, desire and effort, but, despite all the long ages it took to formulate, the scientific method is not conceptually difficult. The basics can be explained, in detail, in an hour or two, after which the reasonably bright and attentive listener can perform a good approximation of thinking and acting like a scientist (Readers who feel they may need more information before saying “aye,” “nay,” or “eh” on this point are invited to read the technical footnote, below). Ah, well, even if Dr. Weinberg had included a most excellent Junior Woodchuck’s guide to the scientific method in his book, I probably would have found myself disagreeing with him on several points. I will give his book 4.5 stars, to show that there are no hard feelings. End of book review. Technical footnote: The last third of To Explain the World is headed “Technical Notes.” This section is all math, designed to give the reader an idea of how the investigators mentioned in the book arrived at their results. It is not actually necessary to read this section in order to appreciate the book, but don’t let it scare you. When it is time to put, say, a cosine, to work, Dr. Weinberg explains what a cosine is, rather than assuming, as most writers will, that you took trig in high school, and, due to being some sort of mutant or something, actually remember it. In a similar spirit, for the benefit of readers who had the proper response (“show me”) to the apparently controversial claim that the process of doing science can be defined and taught, for discussion I offer this sketch/outline of a description of that method by which science is done. The complete description would include consideration of: Observation Wonder or Puzzlement Speculation - Here it is pointed out that no one needs to teach you how to speculate, speculation is a built-in feature of the human brain. Let it rip, let your brain make up its little stories that explain what you observed or suggest what might be done. Do not mistake any one of these stories for the truth, or anything like it, until it is supported by a considerable amount of reproducible physical evidence and can be shown to conflict with none, Literature Search - Meant to be exhaustive. If you are investigating, say, the emerald ash borer, then, before you start making scientific pronouncements about the emerald ash borer you should know as much about the emerald ash borer as anyone in the world, including the emerald ash borer’s mom. If, on the other hand, your goal is to make pseudoscientific statements about the emerald ash borer on the internet or in congress, then you are free to remain utterly ignorant, Hypothesis Investigation – If you are doing experimental science you may be designing and doing experiments to obtain reproducible physical evidence relevant to the viability of a hypothesis, or you may be doing things to see if they work, or you may be trying things to see what happens. If you are doing descriptive science you may be doing dissections, going on an expedition or spending time with a telescope. If you are doing theoretical science you may be doing calculations that, if they look promising, will require experimental and observational support. Conclusion - in the case of experimental science the likely conclusions are “the evidence supports the hypothesis” or “the evidence does not support the hypothesis” but “Wow, didn’t expect THAT!” is also possible. Publication Confrontation - All of your colleagues who are competent in your area are required to point out every weakness in your knowledge, method, results, reasoning and conclusions. You are not allowed to reply “Bite me.” It’s all for the good. If you don’t have an appreciable number of exceptionally bright and well-informed people telling the world where you went wrong, then probably no one is paying any attention to you. Remember that every scientific conclusion, even one that won the Nobel Prize, comes with the unspoken qualifier “until we know better,” followed by More Research – of course All of this is carried on in the presence of a strong, continuous, conscious awareness that your basic tool is a limited, fallible, delusion-prone human brain, and, at any stage, from observation and speculation onward, you are most probably wrong. The goal is reliable inference, reliable conclusions, reliable description, with the hope that we will know things tomorrow that we don’t know today, we will understand things tomorrow that we don’t understand today, and we will be able to do things tomorrow that we can’t do today. Some people think it is fun.