A childhood friend says that I am the only person he knows who grew up to be exactly what he said he wanted to become. But he is mistaken because I was born a scientist. I have no memories when I was not thinking about science, learning it, doing it, teaching it, trying to improve it, pondering it, or sharing it with others. Over my life and career as a scientist, I have been further fulfilled by undergirding my scientific work with reflection and introspection through reading the history, philosophy, and practice of science revealed and disclosed in books like the five I recommend here. Enjoy them as I have!
I wrote
Missing Elements in the Public Science Supporting the COVID-19 Spread Narrative in the US
Though I have been a scientist for nearly all of my life, as a student and as a professional, not until I read this book did I understand what an amazing human activity science is. I had never imagined a world without the word or practice of “science” or even “scientist,” as I do now because of this captivating book.
Wootton’s book is more than a history of how humankind invented and developed one of its most powerful tools. It also reveals the many simply exquisite workings of that tool over the centuries. After pondering its many remarkable revelations, interconnections, and insights, even as a scientist, my appreciation of the significance of science and scientists in the world has re-blossomed.
We live in a world made by science. How and when did this happen? This book tells the story of the extraordinary intellectual and cultural revolution that gave birth to modern science, and mounts a major challenge to the prevailing orthodoxy of its history.
Before 1492 it was assumed that all significant knowledge was already available; there was no concept of progress; people looked for understanding to the past not the future. This book argues that the discovery of America demonstrated that new knowledge was possible: indeed it introduced the very concept of 'discovery', and opened the way to the…
When I was a biomedical science graduate student, this book was on my shelf for a couple of years before I read it. I had pulled it out of a classmate’s trash bag when I was helping him move. Later, when I became distressed because my research findings were dismissed as “controversial,” a postdoctoral fellow in my lab told me that what I experienced was actually quite normal for novel scientific findings and I should read this book.
I did, and it changed forever my understanding of science and how scientists often resist accepting from others the very thing they pursue themselves: new discoveries. When I became a principal scientist, I made a gift of this book to every new scientist graduating from my laboratory.
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…
Once I finished reading Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific Revolutions, it wasn’t long before I learned that he had followed it up with a collection of deeper analyses in the realm of the philosophy of science.
His sequel book took me deeper into the minds and conflicts of noted greats of science whose scientific contributions’ acceptance is now taken for granted by most. Yet, in their own day, they, too, often had to contend with the tension of science’s and scientists’ history of preferring what consensus had ordained as settled knowledge instead of welcoming new insights and discoveries.
"Kuhn has the unmistakable address of a man, who, so far from wanting to score points, is anxious above all else to get at the truth of matters."-Sir Peter Medawar, Nature
I don’t remember how this book made it into my hands, but I am so glad it did! This book has made me a better scientist because it taught me scientific humility. Popper rips apart the very fabric of experimental science’s unique and most powerful tool, the scientific method.
When I taught students at MIT how to apply experimental analysis with the scientific method to establish that an observed effect was, in fact, caused by an identified factor, always in my head, I would hear the words of Popper. Past relationships between factors and effects are not necessarily maintained in the future. This understanding of the nature of the universe reveals the imperfections of science, which rarely proves the world’s truths but often does elucidate them.
Described by the philosopher A.J. Ayer as a work of 'great originality and power', this book revolutionized contemporary thinking on science and knowledge. Ideas such as the now legendary doctrine of 'falsificationism' electrified the scientific community, influencing even working scientists, as well as post-war philosophy. This astonishing work ranks alongside The Open Society and Its Enemies as one of Popper's most enduring books and contains insights and arguments that demand to be read to this day.
As a professor at MIT, I used this book to introduce undergraduates in my course in environmental science to the love of statistics. No doubt it is a fun read because students in disciplines like engineering, biology, physics, and mathematics actually read it! I decided to use it for my course because of its entertaining approach to introducing fundamental statistical concepts and methods as it develops the history of the discipline with amusing color commentary about the principal players who starred in it.
Without sound statistical analyses, experimental data are figments of scientists’ imagination. It is a must-read to enjoy how analysis of something as frivolous as whether a lady can tell if the milk or the tea were added first to a cup inspired one of the most powerful statistical methods.
An insightful, revealing history of the magical mathematics that transformed our world. The Lady Tasting Tea is not a book of dry facts and figures, but the history of great individuals who dared to look at the world in a new way.
At a summer tea party in Cambridge, England, a guest states that tea poured into milk tastes different from milk poured into tea. Her notion is shouted down by the scientific minds of the group. But one man, Ronald Fisher, proposes to scientifically test the hypothesis. There is no better person to conduct such an experiment, for Fisher…
Was COVID-19 in the US only a fabrication and perception of a pandemic? Whatever it was, it caused widespread destruction to American life and health. COVID science was the main authority used to justify and enforce the destructive policies. But most Americans were ill-prepared to evaluate the validity of these “scientific facts” that suddenly threatened their well-being. They were left to trust the rampant pronouncements of equally unqualified public officials and news journalists.
Missing Elements makes the fundamental concepts underpinning COVID science accessible to any reader. It guides readers through the thicket of COVID science to understand that key elements of good scientific practice were missing. Readers will not only understand the failings themselves, but they will also be able to explain them to others.
I come by my interest in history and the years before, during, and after the Second World War honestly. For one thing, both my father and my father-in-law served as pilots in the war, my father a P-38 pilot in North Africa and my father-in-law a B-17 bomber pilot in England. Their histories connect me with a period I think we can still almost reach with our fingertips and one that has had a momentous impact on our lives today. I have taken that interest and passion to discover and write true life stories of the war—focusing on the untold and unheard stories often of the “Average Joe.”
October 24, 1944, is not a day of national remembrance. Yet, more Americans serving in World War II perished on that day than on any other single day of the war.
The narrative of No Average Day proceeds hour by hour and incident by incident while focusing its attention on ordinary individuals—clerks, radio operators, cooks, sailors, machinist mates, riflemen, and pilots and their air crews. All were men who chose to serve their country and soon found themselves in a terrifying and otherworldly place.
No Average Day reveals the vastness of the war as it reaches past the beaches in…
October 24, 1944, is not a day of national remembrance. Yet, more Americans serving in World War II perished on that day than on December 7, 1941, when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, or on June 6, 1944, when the Allies stormed the beaches of Normandy, or on any other single day of the war. In its telling of the events of October 24, No Average Day proceeds hour by hour and incident by incident. The book begins with Army Private First-Class Paul Miller's pre-dawn demise in the Sendai #6B Japanese prisoner of war camp. It concludes with the death…
