Why am I passionate about this?

I almost became a scientist. But something about my undergraduate physics labs—could it be that none of my measurements came out right?—didn't quite grab me, and I found myself, by the time I earned my degree, an observer of science instead. I was just as fascinated with fundamental particles, the origin of life, and artificial intelligence as before, but now I was doing the philosophy, history, and sociology of science. You might even call it the science of science. So perhaps I became a scientist after all, but one intent on the question of how science works and why it works so well.


I wrote...

Book cover of The Knowledge Machine: How Irrationality Created Modern Science

What is my book about?

During the seventeenth-century Scientific Revolution, a handful of radical thinkers, including Francis Bacon and Isaac Newton, hit upon a way…

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The books I picked & why

Book cover of The Structure of Scientific Revolutions

Michael Strevens Why did I love this book?

This is the book that changed my thinking about science—but I had to read it twice before I understood what was really going on. It’s not the revolutions that are radical, but ordinary science, which motivates scientists to undertake long, arduous, risky programs of experimentation or observation by providing a guarantee that they cannot possibly fail.

The guarantee comes in the form of the famous Kuhnian “paradigm,” which is a blueprint for doing scientific research that ordinary scientists are not permitted to question. But paradigms can fail, and so the guarantee that motivates scientists is a piece of fakery. Science, in effect, creates a social institution that dupes scientists into doing what’s good for scientific discovery but maybe not so good for the individual scientist. It’s an astonishing idea.

By Thomas S. Kuhn,

Why should I read it?

15 authors picked The Structure of Scientific Revolutions as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

A good book may have the power to change the way we see the world, but a great book actually becomes part of our daily consciousness, pervading our thinking to the point that we take it for granted, and we forget how provocative and challenging its ideas once were-and still are. "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions" is that kind of book. When it was first published in 1962, it was a landmark event in the history and philosophy of science. And fifty years later, it still has many lessons to teach. With "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions", Kuhn challenged long-standing…


Book cover of Laboratory Life: The Construction of Scientific Facts

Michael Strevens Why did I love this book?

I’m always talking to scientists, but I have never undertaken anything like Bruno Latour’s voyage of ethnographic discovery. He decided to figure out how science works by embedding himself in a scientific lab for two years and, discarding all preconceptions, recording what he saw there as though he were an anthropologist visiting a foreign culture.

It turns out to be an intensely political culture: rather than following prescribed laws of method and logic, scientists are making judgment calls and negotiating with one another to decide the significance of their data, making it up as they go along. Latour brings out the subjectivity of much low-level scientific decision-making, in contrast to Kuhn’s picture, in which the blueprint for thinking—the paradigm—rules over the enterprise like a catechism.

By Bruno Latour, Steve Woolgar, Jonas Salk (editor)

Why should I read it?

1 author picked Laboratory Life as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

This highly original work presents laboratory science in a deliberately skeptical way: as an anthropological approach to the culture of the scientist. Drawing on recent work in literary criticism, the authors study how the social world of the laboratory produces papers and other "texts,"' and how the scientific vision of reality becomes that set of statements considered, for the time being, too expensive to change. The book is based on field work done by Bruno Latour in Roger Guillemin's laboratory at the Salk Institute and provides an important link between the sociology of modern sciences and laboratory studies in the…


Book cover of The Nobel Duel: Two Scientists' 21-Year Race to Win the World's Most Coveted Research Prize

Michael Strevens Why did I love this book?

Of course I love an exposé, heavily seasoned with gossip. Wade’s book tells the story of a race between two teams of scientists to discover the structure of an important brain hormone.

The reality of science is laid out in all its guts and glory: each team leader’s vaulting ambition to win the race, the complicated, error-prone nature of scientific research, and the tremendous and tedious effort involved from day to day—one of the team leaders later estimated he had processed 100,000 pig brains, just to extract enough of the vital substance to run through a testing regime.

In a delightful twist, one of the labs involved in the race is the very place that Latour infiltrated a few years later, and like Latour, Wade shows how the crucial decision to claim that the structure of the molecule had been discovered was as political as it was scientific.

By Nicholas Wade,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked The Nobel Duel as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

Describes the long rivalry between two research scientists to win the Nobel Prize for chemistry


Book cover of Intuition

Michael Strevens Why did I love this book?

Allegra Goodman gets into people’s heads in a way that only a novelist can. In Intuition, the people are scientists, and her portrayal of day-to-day research is extraordinarily realistic. There is the monotony—sometimes many years of rote production-line labor, far from the realm of big ideas or breathtaking breakthroughs—but especially, in this book, the uncertainty.

The plot hinges on an experiment that may be a major discovery—or maybe an illusion. The resulting conflicts, both personal and political, throw the central characters’ lives into absorbing chaos.

By Allegra Goodman,

Why should I read it?

2 authors picked Intuition as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it. This book is for kids age 16, and 17.

What is this book about?

Sandy Glass is a charismatic publicity-seeking doctor. Marion Mendelssohn is an idealistic and rigorous scientist. They are co-directors of a cancer research lab in Boston. As mentors and supervisors to their young proteges, they demand dedication and respect in a competitive environment where funding is scarce and results elusive. So when the experiments of Cliff Bannaker, the youngest members of their team, begin to produce encouraging results, suggesting the very real possibility of a major breakthrough, the entire lab becomes giddy with newfound expectation.

But jealousy soon breeds suspicion and Cliff's colleague - and girlfriend - Robin Decker begins to…


Book cover of Attention Is Discovery: The Life and Legacy of Astronomer Henrietta Leavitt

Michael Strevens Why did I love this book?

I live in the world of words. This book plunged me delightfully into the world of images—photographs of distant galaxies and of artworks inspired by those photographs. The subject of the book is the pioneering astronomer Henrietta Leavitt, whose patient, painstaking scrutiny of astronomical photographs at Harvard 100 years ago led her to discover the patterns in the behavior of Cepheid variable stars that opened the doors to the mapping of the universe.

The author of the book is Anna Von Mertens, a visual artist working with charcoal and textiles who juxtaposes the story of Leavitt’s breakthrough, the work of other women like Leavitt at the Harvard College Observatory, the images that provided the foundation for Leavitt’s thinking, and Von Mertens’ own inspired riffs on those images.

By Anna Von Mertens,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked Attention Is Discovery as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

A portrait of trailblazing astronomer Henrietta Leavitt and an illustrated exploration of the power of attention in scientific observation, artistic creation, and the making of meaning. Our galaxy, the Milky Way, has a diameter of about 100,000 light years a figure we can calculate because of the work of Henrietta Leavitt (1868 1921), who spent decades studying glass plate photographs of the night sky. Visual artist and researcher Anna Von Mertens s Attention Is Discovery is a fascinating portrait of this remarkable woman who laid the foundation for modern cosmology, as well as an exploration of the power of looking…


Explore my book 😀

Book cover of The Knowledge Machine: How Irrationality Created Modern Science

What is my book about?

During the seventeenth-century Scientific Revolution, a handful of radical thinkers, including Francis Bacon and Isaac Newton, hit upon a way of investigating the natural world—the motions of planets, the behavior of gases, the inner springs of the human body—that would reveal the underlying principles that govern matter and mind.

My book asks what these thinkers, the first modern scientists, did differently and why their innovations came so late in the course of human history. I challenge the usual picture of science as a paragon of logic, showing that the invention of modern science required less rationality. Ignoring religion, beauty, and philosophy, scientists embraced an unreasonably narrow method of inquiry—and that narrowness channeled their energy into observation and experiment, where it could do the most good.

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Book cover of Black Crow Cabin

Peggy Webb Author Of Without a Trace

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Why am I passionate about this?

Author Bookworm Pianist Master Gardener Gigi to 4 grands Lover of porches and hot tea

Peggy's 3 favorite reads in 2024

What is my book about?

A small town in the grips of evil... a single mom with nowhere to turn... and a madman who will stop at nothing to get what he wants.

He is the Collector, and he's taking prized possessions, pets, and children, keeping what he wants, and burying his rejects in shallow graves. When he comes after Rachel Logan, an ordinary schoolteacher living on a ranch with her grandmother and her two children, she has no weapon except her wits.

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Black Crow Cabin

By Peggy Webb,

What is this book about?

A small town in the grips of evil... a single mom with nowhere to turn... and a madman who will stop at nothing to get what he wants.

He is the Collector, and he's taking prized possessions, pets, and children, keeping what he wants, and burying his rejects in shallow graves. When he comes after Rachel Logan, an ordinary schoolteacher living on a ranch with her grandmother and her two children, she has no weapon except her wits.

But how can she stop a monster who outdoes Hannibal Lecter in cunning and depravity?


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