Fans pick 100 books like The Invention of Science

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.

On the surface, this seems a dry treatise on the process of scientific change, but as you get into it, you encounter again and again the stories of hardheaded researchers convinced that the world explained by current theory just doesn’t make sense and shows how they were driven, often reluctantly, to make sense of things. Priestley’s and Lavoisier’s experiments are included with many others but always set within the framework of a discipline in a “crisis” that needs to be resolved.

The personal costs are not neglected–ridicule, isolation from the accepted “establishment,” sometimes far worse. Scientific progress is often portrayed as a triumph of individual imagination confirmed by wider testing and collaboration. Kuhn’s work took that self-serving myth and tossed it out the window.

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.

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.

Shapin makes the audacious claim that there never really was a scientific revolution in Early Modern Europe, despite the fact that “the scientific revolution” has been a central organizing idea in the history of science and the history of Western culture more generally.

His provocative book provides a useful and engaging assessment of the utility of the concept of “the scientific revolution” for making sense of developments in the history of science.  He challenges us to think about the place of radical changes in the history of science, and whether the claims scientists make about such changes are merely rhetorical constructions.

Despite Shapin’s arguments, I am inclined to think something very significant happened in the sciences in the 16th and 17th Centuries, something that deserves to be called “revolutionary”. But Shapin’s book will certainly make readers reflect on what they mean by scientific revolution.

While this book is not about science, it gives the social context for how ancient scientific and anti-scientific ideas developed in slave-owning societies and before. It is the best description of the development of human society to the end of the ancient period that I’ve ever read.

Unfortunately, some of the anti-science ideas of ancient slave-owners, discredited in the scientific revolution, are still with us today, and Child explains how they came to be.

I appreciate this book because it provides an excellent historical overview of an important aspect of science, i.e., the occurrence of scientific revolutions from the 17th to the 20th century, and it does not include psychoanalysis.

Cohen’s book proposes an interesting "theory" of scientific revolutions which inspired me to develop a philosophical model of scientific revolutions, which I dubbed the "chain-of-reasoning" model.

Cohen was a renowned historian of science. His book is very well written and does not require technical knowledge of particular theories. It is very long but it can be studied selectively. 

We are living in a time when ideology, myth, superstition, and ignorance seem to have more influence than ever in shaping our future.

This excellent and important book by Shawn Otto explains the forces (political and economic) at work that are aimed at undermining the role that knowledge and rational empirical evidence might play in making rational public policy decisions. This includes the effort to weaken the role that science might ideally play in helping us to address real-world challenges.

As one who studies and seeks to assess disaster preparedness, response, and mitigation, I have come to believe this “war” on science holds the potential to give birth to ever greater and more expensive (especially in terms of human costs) disasters.  

If you know anyone who still holds on to the belief that science can operate in a political vacuum, please thrust this book upon them! In 1673, a brave philosopher called Francois Poullain de la Barre publicly observed that he saw no reason why women could not be treated as the equals of men in all spheres of influence, including science. The Mind has no Sex, he declared! In this wonderfully readable book on the history of women in science, Londa Schiebinger shows us just how that belief played out. Track the jaw-dropping arrogance of science’s male gatekeepers as they systematically used every trick in their power to exclude women, weaponising their biology against them (Blame the Brain!), demeaning and downgrading their annoyingly evident talents. This book will make you angry – and so it should!