Volume 1, Number 12 · February 6, 1964
Science As History
By Ernest Nagel
Scientific Change
edited by A.C. Crombie
Basic Books, 896 pp., $17.50
The late Alfred North Whitehead is said to have once presided at a lecture by Bertrand Russell on the philosophical implications of what was then the new quantum mechanics, and to have closed the meeting by thanking Russell for his presentation and especially for 'leaving the vast darkness of the subject unobscured.' The more than five-score contributors to the volume under review—a good number of them historians of science and technology, living in the United States and various European countries including Russia—deserve similar thanks. The book contains the proceedings of a week-long symposium, held at Oxford in July 1961, on 'the intellectual, social and technical conditions for scientific discovery and technical invention from antiquity to the present.' Of the twenty-eight papers invited, about a third deal with the relations between scientific achievements and their socio-cultural environment, another third examine the internal development and the content of various scientific ideas and methods, while the remaining ones discuss questions bearing on the nature and the pursuit of the history of science as an intellectual discipline. However, though the learning most of the participants exhibit is impressive and often illuminating, only a few of them address themselves explicitly to the nominal theme of the symposium. There will doubtless be disagreement on whether the symposiasts have advanced our understanding of scientific change much beyond what was already known; but no one can seriously dispute that they succeeded in leaving the darkness of the subject unobscured.
Review, 3144 words
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