Book I read in September 2006

Only one book this month. :-(

John Gribbin, The Fellowship: The Story of a Revolution, Penguin, 2006.

And it wasn't even a great book. Rather disappointing, actually. Well, I suppose I shouldn't have expected much. I saw this book when it came out in hardback last year, but was put off by the sensationalist title, typical of a particularly bad type of popular history of science title. But since I was starting to look at natural theology written by early members of the Royal Society of London, I thought I should give it a read. Fortunately, I found it in paperback, so I didn't have to fork out nearly $50 for it.

John Gribbin is a very popular popular science writer, and I have a couple of his books - In Search of Schrodinger's Cat and In Search of the Big Bang - but I haven't actually read those yet... Perhaps he writes fantastic popular science, and if he makes complicated concepts accessible to the general public - people such as myself for whom quantum physics is fascinating but out of reach - then that's all good. But his history of science is not very good. Very Whiggish, in fact.

I was particularly struck by this quote, on p. 13 of the Introduction:

Galileo... would not have called himself a scientist, nor used the word 'science', which wasn't coined until the nineteenth century. It stems from the Latin scientia, meaning 'knowledge'; a term which Galileo and his contemporaries would have been thoroughly familiar with, although in a much broader context than our science. They would have regarded themselves as natural philosophers, the heirs to Greeks such as Pythagoras and Aristotle. But as the old saying goes, if it looks like a duck, flies like a duck, and quacks like a duck, then it is a duck. In modern terminology, the people who are the subjects of this book were scientists, and what they did was science; only the saddest pedant would object to my use of the word science in this context.

Well, I guess I'm the saddest pedant then. Though, perhaps I don't object to his use of the word 'science' as much as his uncritical use of the word 'science'. Perhaps there was a reason that Galileo and others regarded themselves as natural philosophers - in Galileo's case, philosophers were paid more than mathematicians! And the word 'science' was used before the 19th century. Even Thomas Aquinas, for example, regarded theology as 'the Queen of the sciences.' But 'sciences' were not 'natural philosophy'. Galileo worked on mathematical sciences such as astronomy and mechanics, but these weren't natural philosophy. Descartes worked on sciences such as optics, but his natural philosophy was different. Not much hope for the history of science if we can't even figure out what it is we are studying!!!

Grr.