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This book aims to describe, for readers uneducated in science, the development of humanity's desire to know and understand the world around us through the various stages of its development to the present, when science is almost universally recognized -- at least in the Western world -- as the most reliable way of knowing. the book describes the history of the large-scale exploration of the surface of the earth by sea, beginning with the Vikings and the Chinese, and of the unknown interiors of the American and African continents by foot and horseback. After the invention of the telescope, visual exploration of the surfaces of the Moon and Mars were made possible, and finally a visit to the Moon. the book then turns to our legacy from the ancient Greeks of wanting to understand rather than just know, and why the scientific way of understanding is valued. for concreteness, it relates the lives and accomplishments of six great scientists, four from the nineteenth century and two from the twentieth. Finally, the book explains how chemistry came to be seen as the most basic of the sciences, and then how physics became the most fundamental.

Tabla de contenidos provista por Syndetics

• Introduction(p. vii)
• 1 We Want to Know(p. 1)
• Looking at the Heavens(p. 4)
• Exploratory Voyages(p. 8)
• 2 We Want to Understand(p. 25)
• Charles Darwin(p. 36)
• Gregor Mendel(p. 43)
• Louis Pasteur(p. 51)
• Michael Faraday(p. 59)
• Max Planck(p. 65)
• Enrico Fermi(p. 68)
• 3 Science(p. 71)
• Chemistry as the Fundamental Science(p. 71)
• How Physics Became Most Fundamental(p. 74)
• On Reductionism(p. 81)
• References and Further Reading(p. 85)
• Illustrations Credits(p. 87)
• Index(p. 89)

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CHOICE Review

This very slender book is a welcome antidote to the movement, especially in the US, that denies established science such as evolution and global warming. Though Newton (Indiana Univ.) does not address current issues, he provides a framework for understanding reality. The first section of this work recounts the beginning of human curiosity about the cosmos and the world. It is brief but includes the efforts of Western and Eastern explorers to discover and understand nature. The second section contains snapshot biographies of a selected group of Western scientists, from Faraday and Mendel to Darwin and Fermi. However, it surprisingly omits some obvious choices such as Galileo, Newton, and Einstein even as their names are mentioned in other contexts. In the last section, the author provides a basis for understanding how fundamental science started with chemistry (molecules) and moved onto physics (elementary particles). But as Newton writes, "the reduction of one discipline of phenomena to another does not necessarily rob it of its own distinct character." Illustrations include photographs and sketches. Summing Up: Recommended. All levels/libraries. N. Sadanand Central Connecticut State University