Science

03 Oct 1994 12:03

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Scientific method and philosophy of science, sociology of science and history of science merit their own entries.

Culture of scientists; scientific belles lettres (e.g. D'Arcy Thompson, Medawar, Gould, Thomas); relations to general culture and world-view; education of scientists; science education for non-scientists; pseudo-sciences; hostility to science.

See also: The Role of Experts and Science in Democracy; Scientific Thinking

Recommended:
• Annals of Improbable Research [Gives good talk]
• Jacques Barzun, Science, the Glorious Entertainment
• Timothy Ferris, The Mind's Sky
• Loren R. Graham, The Ghost of the Executed Engineer
• Gross and Levitt, Higher Superstition
• Peter Medawar
  • Advice to a Young Scientist
  • The Limits of Science
  • Pluto's Republic
• I. A. Richards, Science and Poetry
• Joseph Schumpeter, "Science and Ideology", American Economic Review 39 (1949): 346--359 [JSTOR]
• Gerald Weissmann, The Doctor with Two Heads

To read:
• Francis Aprahamian and Brenda Swann (eds.), J. D. Bernal: A Life in Science and Politics
• John Brockman (ed.)
  • The Third Culture [despite the marvellously cutting review in Nature]
  • How Things Are (also ed. by Matson)
• Bronowski, The Common Sense of Science
• Deborah R. Coen, Vienna in the Age of Uncertainty: Science, Liberalism, and Private Life
• Crick, What Mad Pursuit
• Peter Dear, The Intelligibility of Nature: How Science Makes Sense of the World
• Gary Lee Downey and Joseph Dumit (eds.), Cyborgs and Citadels: Anthropological Interventions in Emerging Sciences
• Frank Durham, Multiple Newtons
• Feuer, The Scientific Intellectual
• John Franklin, The End of Science Writing
• Alan Irwin and Brian Wynne (eds.), Misunderstanding Science? The Public Reconstruction of Science and Technology
• Bruno Latour
  • Science in Action
  • We Have Never Been Modern
• Nina Lykke and Rosi Braidotti (eds.), Between Monsters, Goddesses and Cyborgs: Feminist Confrontations With Science, Medicine and Cyberspace
• National Association of Science Writers
• Marjorie Nicolson
  • Breaking the Circle
  • Newton Demands the Muse
  • Mountain Gloom and Mountain Glory
  • Science and Imagination
  • Voyages to the Moon
• David Nye, American Technological Sublime
• Robert Pool, Beyond Engineering: How Society Shapes Technology
• Rosamund Wolff Purcell + Stephen Jay Gould
  • Illuminations
  • Finders, Keepers
• John Rogers, The Matter of Revolution: Science, Poetry, and Politics in the Age of Milton
• Rosen, Symmetry in Science
• Andrew Ross,
  • Strange Weather
  • (ed.) Technoculture
• Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer, Leviathan & the Air-Pump: Hobbes, Boyle & the Experimental Life [but see Gross & Levitt for rebuttals of some claims about Hobbes]
• Eugene B. Skolnikoff, The Elusive Transformation: Science, Technology, and the Evolution of International Politics
• Jonathan Smith, Fact and Feeling: Baconian Science and the 19th Century Literary Imagination
• Small, Ariel like a Harpy (history of the Frankenstein myth)
• Ronald C. Tobey, Technology As Freedom: The New Deal and the Electrical Modernization of the American Home
• Keith Stewart Thomson, The Common but Less Frequent Loon and Other Essays
• Frederick Turner
  • The Culture of Hope: A New Birth of the Classical Spirit ["A manifesto for a new vision of culture that is both radical and classical, sharply indicts the mediocrities infesting the arts tday, citing their rejection of morality, scientific truth and dismissal of cultural heritage, arguing the revolution occuring in the frontier fields of scientific thought will invigorate the artists of the future." Alas, it would an excess of charity to call Prof. Turner's understanding of even the settled regions of scientific thought, never mind the frontier fields, painfully superficial. Since he provides no references, I can't tell whether he's been mislead, or is actually stupid; judging from some of the sensible things in Natural Classicism, probably just mislead.]
  • Natural Classicism
  • Rebirth of Value: Meditations on Beauty, Ecology, Religion, and Education
• Wetherbee (trans), Cosmographia of Bernardus Silvestris
• Alfred North Whitehead, Science and the Modern World
• Joseph Wright (painter, member of the Lunar Society)
• Ziman, Prometheus Bound