Harper Perennial To Explain the World: The Discovery of Modern Science

Did you know that Dr. Steven Weinberg, the author of this book, along with getting the Nobel Prize, also received the Lewis Thomas Prize for Scientist as Poet? He did.Reading some of Dr. Weinberg’s earlier writing left me with the impression that he is an intelligent fellow who is capable of looking at more than one side of an issue and is likely to arrive at conclusions that are reasonable, if not necessarily likely to garner universal agreement. Reading an excerpt from this book, I was struck by the line “As great as is the progress that has been made in the methods of science, we may today be repeating some of the errors of the past.” Uh-oh, I thought, better find out about that, I don’t want to be going all Ptolemy on anybody without realizing it.Dr. Weinberg starts off by considering what the ancient Greeks had to say about the natural world. He begins with Thales, who said “Everything is water,” which is remembered as the first physical Theory of Everything. Dr. Weinberg seems to think that this theory wasn’t too bad for a first try, but, personally, I think Heraclitus’s “Everything is fire” has more pizzazz. We then visit with Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Democritus, all bright fellows, to be sure, but, when they turned to science, “none of them attempted to verify or even . . . seriously to justify their speculations.” This point seems a bit exaggerated. Aristotle’s argument that if the Earth moved, then a ball thrown straight up in the air would not come straight down to where it was thrown, sounds to me like an attempt to support a conclusion. A kindergarten–level experiment would have sufficed to cast doubt on Aristotle’s thinking, but the classical philosophers’ method of investigation was not experimentation but discussion and argument. Philosophy was compared to a wrestling match, with the expectation that shaky ideas would be beaten down and the strongest and therefore best philosophy would come out on top.The successors to the classical Greeks, the technicians, mathematicians and scientists of the Hellenistic era, had a better handle on things. Dr. Weinberg admires Hero and thinks the world of Archimedes, but he devotes more pages to Ptolemy’s “Almagest,” which was a standard astronomy text for more than a thousand years, but today is seen as THE science botch of all time, and a lesson to us all.Dr. Weinberg then discusses Arab and European scholarship in the Middle Ages. Much of the sophistication of Greece and Rome was gone, and religious leaders felt that, if there was to be such a thing as thinking, every bit of it should be concerned with holy writ and the wisdom of the saints. Questioning was out. But there was still astronomy, needed to make the calendars that told you when it was a holy day, and astronomy kept men thinking about the natural order. And there was Aristotle, and Aristotle, for all Dr. Weinberg’s critical opinion of him, got men to thinking about thinking, and logical thinking at that.Dr. Weinberg then comes to the Scientific Revolution, which he considers as beginning with Copernicus. Galileo’s experiments on falling bodies – which demonstrated that Aristotle’s not-experiment-based ideas in this area were wrong - are Dr. Weinberg’s starting point for modern experimental science. The book that Galileo wrote about these experiments had to be smuggled out of Italy and published in London, since, by that time, the Church had arrested and tortured Galileo, forcing him to recant his teaching that the Earth moves (which, it was argued, was in conflict with a few sentences in the Old Testament that talk about the sun moving across the sky and do not say that it was the spinning of the Earth that made it appear that the sun was moving in the heavens) and sentenced him to permanent house arrest, and banned his books, and forbade him to publish anything ever again. As Darwin also could have told you, being a scientist is not for wimps.The idea of experimental science took hold: “No longer were natural philosophers relying on nature to reveal its principles to casual observers.” Experimental science was rolling along pretty well by the time Isaac Newton arrived on the scene. “Newton’s achievements provided the paradigm that all subsequent science has followed.” Newton was The Man.Dr. Weinberg’s short-list of the greatest scientists of all time reads “Galileo, Newton, Darwin, Einstein,” all world changers and earth shakers.Dr. Weinberg points out that while it is perfectly possible for a person to be both very religious and very scientific (Newton was such a one), “It was essential for the discovery of science that religious ideas be divorced from the study of nature. Once one invokes the supernatural, anything can be explained, and no explanation can be verified.” So, scientists run into trouble with established religions. Along with the church’s pounding down of Galileo, we are told about Anaxagoras, who had to flee Athens after teaching that the sun is not a god but a physical object, and Hypatia, who was literally torn to pieces by a mob of good Christians for the unforgivable crimes of being a scientist, a mathematician, and, at the same time, a woman, a pagan, and hot. Dr. Weinberg also mentions fellow Nobel Prize winner Abdus Salaam, a devout Moslem, who, when he attempted to promote scientific research in the Islamic Middle East, was told that, for the Faithful, the study of science would be “culturally corrosive.” Whether Islam would benefit from cultural corrosion of this sort I will leave to the internet’s “comment” pages.Particular pleasures:Philosophers, natural and un-, have, figuratively speaking, been beating each other over the head with inflated pig bladders since day one. It’s a tradition that Dr. Weinberg gleefully joins in this book. Aristotle takes a drubbing throughout, but the chapter in which Dr. Weinberg disrespects Francis Bacon and Rene Descartes, was, by itself, worth the price of admission.Disappointments:Dr. Weinberg never does say which errors of the past are the ones that we might be repeating today. I guess we will just have to keep our guard up and hope for the best.I had a half-formed hope that Dr. Weinberg, in this book subtitled “The Discovery of Modern Science,” would spell out just what was achieved, providing an explicit, concise, lucid, perhaps even poetic, description of, and users guide for, the scientific method, preferably one suitable for copying and pasting into every single internet discussion of evolution and global warming.Dr. Weinberg did not do this. He seems happiest with a description of science as a rudderless chaos that sometimes manages to produce results in spite of itself, or as “a tangle of deduction, induction, and guesswork.” “We learn how to do science, not by making rules about how to do science, but from the experience of doing science.”I have a tiny little small suspicion that Dr. Weinberg talks about science in this way in order to allow string theory to be classified as “science” rather than as “mathematical pastime.” But his description allows the most uninformed cranks in the universe to have as much right as anyone to claim that their conclusions are scientific, “Oh, yeah, we got a HUGE tangle of induction, deduction, reduction, convection and guesswork going on here ALL the time.”No one should be led to suppose that science is whatever you happen to think, or something indefinable and unteachable. Putting it into practice requires discipline, desire and effort, but, despite all the long ages it took to formulate, the scientific method is not conceptually difficult. The basics can be explained, in detail, in an hour or two, after which the reasonably bright and attentive listener can perform a good approximation of thinking and acting like a scientist (Readers who feel they may need more information before saying “aye,” “nay,” or “eh” on this point are invited to read the technical footnote, below).Ah, well, even if Dr. Weinberg had included a most excellent Junior Woodchuck’s guide to the scientific method in his book, I probably would have found myself disagreeing with him on several points. I will give his book 4.5 stars, to show that there are no hard feelings. End of book review.Technical footnote:The last third of To Explain the World is headed “Technical Notes.” This section is all math, designed to give the reader an idea of how the investigators mentioned in the book arrived at their results. It is not actually necessary to read this section in order to appreciate the book, but don’t let it scare you. When it is time to put, say, a cosine, to work, Dr. Weinberg explains what a cosine is, rather than assuming, as most writers will, that you took trig in high school, and, due to being some sort of mutant or something, actually remember it.In a similar spirit, for the benefit of readers who had the proper response (“show me”) to the apparently controversial claim that the process of doing science can be defined and taught, for discussion I offer this sketch/outline of a description of that method by which science is done. The complete description would include consideration of:ObservationWonder or PuzzlementSpeculation - Here it is pointed out that no one needs to teach you how to speculate, speculation is a built-in feature of the human brain. Let it rip, let your brain make up its little stories that explain what you observed or suggest what might be done. Do not mistake any one of these stories for the truth, or anything like it, until it is supported by a considerable amount of reproducible physical evidence and can be shown to conflict with none,Literature Search - Meant to be exhaustive. If you are investigating, say, the emerald ash borer, then, before you start making scientific pronouncements about the emerald ash borer you should know as much about the emerald ash borer as anyone in the world, including the emerald ash borer’s mom. If, on the other hand, your goal is to make pseudoscientific statements about the emerald ash borer on the internet or in congress, then you are free to remain utterly ignorant,HypothesisInvestigation – If you are doing experimental science you may be designing and doing experiments to obtain reproducible physical evidence relevant to the viability of a hypothesis, or you may be doing things to see if they work, or you may be trying things to see what happens. If you are doing descriptive science you may be doing dissections, going on an expedition or spending time with a telescope. If you are doing theoretical science you may be doing calculations that, if they look promising, will require experimental and observational support.Conclusion - in the case of experimental science the likely conclusions are “the evidence supports the hypothesis” or “the evidence does not support the hypothesis” but “Wow, didn’t expect THAT!” is also possible.PublicationConfrontation - All of your colleagues who are competent in your area are required to point out every weakness in your knowledge, method, results, reasoning and conclusions. You are not allowed to reply “Bite me.” It’s all for the good. If you don’t have an appreciable number of exceptionally bright and well-informed people telling the world where you went wrong, then probably no one is paying any attention to you. Remember that every scientific conclusion, even one that won the Nobel Prize, comes with the unspoken qualifier “until we know better,”followed byMore Research – of courseAll of this is carried on in the presence of a strong, continuous, conscious awareness that your basic tool is a limited, fallible, delusion-prone human brain, and, at any stage, from observation and speculation onward, you are most probably wrong. The goal is reliable inference, reliable conclusions, reliable description, with the hope that we will know things tomorrow that we don’t know today, we will understand things tomorrow that we don’t understand today, and we will be able to do things tomorrow that we can’t do today. Some people think it is fun.

Steven Weinberg says there was a scientific revolution in the sixteenth and seventeenth century. To his credit, he provides enough information to support a contrary theory. I agree with the theory that modern science began in the thirteenth century when the Catholic Church condemned the Aristotelian idea that vacuums are impossible. Before that, the scientific achievements in ancient and non-Western civilizations were sporadic and not sustained. The following quote supports this theory:"After the era of translation and the conflict over the reception of Aristotle, creative scientific work began at last in Europe in the fourteenth century." (2079)What happened in the 14th century in the West is that scientific knowledge progressed in a continuous way with one scientist building upon the achievements of other scientists. The author gives a clue as to why this happened:"Robert Merton supposed that Protestantism created social attitudes favorable to science and promoted a combination of rationalism and empiricism and a belief in an understandable order in nature--attitudes and beliefs that he found in the actual behavior of Protestant scientists."(3977)Science developed in the West, and not in the other civilizations, because scientists believed God created the universe from nothing. This means the universe has an "understandable order in nature," which inspires humans to try to understand the universe. The idea that vacuums are impossible implies that God did not create the universe because God has infinite power and could have created vacuums. Weinberg discusses the Condemnation of 1277, as it is called, but thinks it hindered the development of scientific knowledge.In my opinion, Steven Weinberg is suffering from cognitive dissonance because his atheism conflicts with the reality that so many people believe in God. The following quote indicates that he is obsessed with religion because he feels a need to express his lack of faith in God in a book about science and history:"It is not that the modern scientist makes a decision from the start that there are no supernatural persons. That happens to be my view, but there are good scientists who are seriously religious." (789)The following quote shows that Weinberg's mental and emotional suffering inhibits him from being rational:"Or we may encounter phenomena that in principle cannot be brought into a unified framework for all science. For instance, although we may well come to understand the processes in the brain responsible for consciousness, it is hard to see how we will ever describe conscious feelings themselves in physical terms." (4199)There is an equally irrational quotation from Carl Sagan as recalled by Sean Carroll in a TV interview on the PBS Newshour. Dr. Carroll posted the video on his blog on March 14, 2014, with the title "A Great Time for Reason and Science." This is the quote:"We are a collection of atoms and particles like the rest of the universe, but we have the power to theorize, to gather data, and to understand this universe." The phrase "brain responsible for consciousness" is a reference to the conscious knowledge of humans as opposed to the sense knowledge of animals. Science is a method of inquiry arising from sense observations. For example: Why is the sky blue? Knowing the sky is blue means more than that light is entering your eye and a signal is going to your brain. It means an awareness of this. Humans ask the question: What is this awareness? This is not a scientific question because it does not arise from our senses. The question arises because we can make ourselves the subject of our own knowledge. It is a metaphysical question.Humans have had a lot of success in answering scientific questions, as this book explains. One can reasonably say there are no mysteries in science, only questions not yet answered. There is very little success answering metaphysical questions and the word mystery is necessary. Concerning consciousness, that word can be avoided by saying, "The sky is manifesting its blueness, and humans are open to that manifestation." There is no evidence that human consciousness is a brain process. There is, of course, evidence that the sense knowledge of animals is a brain process.On the subject of consciousness, Steven Weinberg, Sean Carroll, and Carl Sagan have a blind spot. However, the following quote reveals that Weinberg did not go to a Catholic college:"For Descartes the only certain fact is that he exists, deduced from the observation that he is thinking about it. ....He (Rene Descartes) gives several arguments (all unconvincing) for the existence of God, but rejects the authority of organized religion." (3162)"He was wrong in saying that the pineal gland is the seat of a soul responsible for human consciousness."(3181)Descartes did not "deduce" that he existed. His quote, "I think, therefore I am," expressed a common metaphysical experience that we all have. We know that we exist, not because we can see ourselves, but because we can turn into ourselves and catch ourselves in the act of our own existence.Descartes was trying to explain free will by saying there is a spiritual "little man" located behind the eyes that controls the body like a stagecoach driver controls a team of horses. This nonsense is called dualism and conflicts with the metaphysics of Thomas Aquinas who said that unity is a transcendental property of being. A stagecoach driver and team of horses is not a being, it is many beings.Descartes arguments for God's existence were probably based on the famous "five ways" of Aquinas and the "prime mover" argument of Aristotle. The best argument for God's existence is called the cosmological argument for historical reasons only. It is based on the metaphysics of Aquinas and the observation that we have free will. Free will means we possess a center of action that makes us unified with respect to ourselves but different from other humans. In other words, humans are finite beings. A finite being can't be the reason for its own existence because it can't limit itself. Assuming or hoping that the universe is intelligible, means an infinite being exists and caused the universe of finite beings. In Western religions, we call the infinite being God.Body and soul are the metaphysical principles of matter and form applied to humans. All humans are equal because we are all members of the same class or category of beings. The soul is the metaphysical principle or incomplete being that makes us humans, and the body is what makes us different from each other.We can comprehend what a human being is because we know everything we do and everything that happens to us. However, we can't define or explicate what a human is. We can only say that humans are embodied spirits. Another way of expressing this is to say the human soul is spiritual. To sum up, physics professors Weinberg, Carroll, and Sagan don't know what they are talking about.Astronomical discoveries in the 1960s and later prove the universe began to exist 14 billion years ago. This raises the scientific question: What caused the Big Bang? There is no scientific answer to this question, and many people think this "gap" is evidence of God's existence. My understanding is that the Big Bang is evidence God does not exist because it is evidence that the universe is not intelligible. The Big Bang, however, a reason to believe in the Bible because the Bible says in a number of places that God created the universe from nothing.There are four other gaps like this: What caused prokaryotes to appear on Earth 3.6 billion years ago? What caused mammals to evolve from prokaryotes? What caused the fine-tuning of the physical constants to enabled biological life? What caused the second law of thermodynamics to be suspended when life began and evolved into mammals?One can call these five arguments for God's existence pseudoscience. Atheists respond to this pseudoscience with pseudoscience that is more egregiously wrong. Atheists are trying to fight fire with fire, or anxiety is inhibiting them from thinking rationally and behaving honestly. This is the pseudoscientific response to the five god-of-gaps arguments:1) The Big Bang was caused by a vacuum fluctuation.2) Life on Earth came from another galaxy.3) Evolution was caused by natural selection.4) There are other many other universes where the constants are different.5) The second law of thermodynamics only applies to closed systems.Weinberg promotes #3 and #4 in his book. For evolution, I recommend that he read these scholarly works:  Evolution Revolution: Evolution is True. Darwin is Wrong. This Changes Everything. , by Alan Bennett;  Evolution: A View from the 21st Century (paperback) , by James A. Shapiro; and  The Plausibility of Life: Resolving Darwin's Dilemma  by Marc W. Kirschner and John C. Gerhart. Concerning the multiverse theory, I suggest that he put on his thinking cap.Weinberg and Carroll are guilty by association of promoting #5 because they are American physicists. The American Journal of Physics published an article titled "Entropy and evolution" (Am. J. Phys., Vol. 76, No. 11, November 2008) saying evolution does not violate the second law of thermodynamics and giving the results of an absurd calculation. The article disgraces every physicist in the United States.There is another example of pseudoscience in his book that does not reflect badly on Weinberg's character because it is found in physics textbooks on quantum mechanics. In fact, I may be the one who is guilty of pseudoscience."Instead of calculating the trajectories of a planet or a particle, one calculates the evolution of waves of probability, whose intensity at any position and time tells us the probability of finding the planet or particle then and there." (3896)Weinberg is referring to the Born statistical interpretation of the Shrödinger function. There is a lot of evidence that the Shrödinger function is a wave, but there is no evidence it is a probability wave. I give my arguments in an ezinearticle.com article titled "The Metaphysics of Quantum Mechanics." Evolution Revolution: Evolution is True. Darwin is Wrong. This Changes Everything.Evolution: A View from the 21st Century (paperback)The Plausibility of Life: Resolving Darwin's Dilemma

This is an excellent account not only of the history of the development of modern science but also of the discovery of how to do modern science, by one of the world’s outstanding living scientists. The book should be accessible to the reader without scientific training, but is also fascinating for those of us who are familiar with the basic concepts discussed but not with the details nor the societal context within which they were developed. As with so many other things, the first people reasoning about the nature of things (beyond the primitive mythologies) were the Greeks of 600-500 BC. According to legend, Thales knew of geometry from Egypt and believed that the world is animate and full of divinities, and that water was the universal primary substance. Empedocles by the mid 400s BC had generalized this to four elements—water, air, earth and fire—and by the late 400s BC Democritus believed that matter consisted of tiny indivisible particles called atoms. Democritus’ teacher, Leucippus, believed “No thing happens in vain, but everything for a reason and by necessity”. Plato brought these four elements and atoms together, associating the atoms of each with a geometric shape, and Aristotle later added a fifth element, the ether that filled space above the moon. Aristotle believed that terrestrial motion was determined by a body moving immediately to its proper location—earth below, then water, then air and finally fire above. He reasoned that there was a first cause for this terrestrial motion or change to enable things to be in their proper place and serve their proper purpose, whereas heavenly bodies move on spheres centered on the earth because a sphere was the most perfect shape, and the earth of course must be the center of everything. This was the age of philosophy, and truth was found by reasoning—the idea of looking up to see if the heavenly bodies actually did circle around the earth or do an experiment to find out how something moves terrestrially certainly did not occur to anyone. Aristotle said that the heavenly bodies must move on circles centered on the earth, and this became doctrine of the Roman catholic church, which from the fall of the Roman empire until the Reformation was the last word in all matters temporal as well as spiritual, in Europe. Small epi-circles on the larger spheres and even smaller epi-epi-circles on the epi-circles, with rotation at different speeds and in different directions, were allowed in order to fit the accumulating data by Eudoxus, Ptolemy and others. Ptolemy (150 AD) encapsulated this model of the solar system within an elaborate framework described in the Almagest in which the various spheresand “offsets” for the center of the sphere on which the body rotated about another larger body from the actual center of the body in question (planet, moon, etc.) were taken as free parameters to be adjusted to fit the heavenly observations, a practice scorned by the philosophers of the day as being “data-fitting” (to match observation) not “physics” (from reason alone in order to satisfy the body’s preordained “purpose”, and therefore to be preferred). With the fall of the Roman Empire, midieval Europe indeed entered a dark age, and the philosophy and science of the Greeks was preserved, if not much advanced, in the countries of Islam, where it ultimately became viewed as dangerous to religious belief. The author credits Copernicus (b 1473 AD in Poland) with beginning the scientific revolution, in Europe. Copernicus published an anonymous Commentariolus in about 1510 (only published in his name after his death) putting forward a belief that the sun, rather than the earth, was the center about which all the heavenly bodies except the moon rotated, and only the moon rotated about the earth. From this it followed that the apparent daily motion of stars around the earth was entirely due to the earth’s motion, and that the apparent motion of the sun and planets arose jointly from the earth’s revolution about its axis and partly from the earth’s revolution about the sun, like that of the other planets. In other words, men (at least the few of those looking) were viewing the heavens from a moving, revolving point, not a fixed point. This was indeed a revolutionary viewpoint, and one with which Copernicus wisely did not associate himself publically, given the fate of burning at the stake imposed a few years later on the Italian philosopher Giordano Bruno by the Roman Inquisition for holding such views. Copernicus published the details of his system in De Revolutionibus only as he lay on his deathbed in 1543. Although vigorously opposed by the Catholic church and opposed less venomously by the Protestant church, Copernicus’ system was much simpler than Ptolemy’s and quickly gained acceptance among astronomers and mathematicians who set about devising mathematical transformations of the theory of Copernicus to one in which the earth rather than the sun is stationary, most prominent of whom was the Dane Tycho Brahe, an extraordinarily proficient astronomical observer. The Austrian mathematician Johannes Kepler, who was influenced by Copernicus, conjectured that each of the heavenly spheres just fits inside one of the five regular polyhedrons, but after trying for years to reconcile this with Brahe’s huge collection of planetary observations, abandoned this heavenly spheres assumption of Plato, Aristotle, Ptolemy, Copernicus and Brahe that planets move on circles and concluded from the observations that planets move on ellipses. Kepler then went on to pose three laws for planetary motion based on application of mathematics to Brahe’s observations. The work of Copernicus and Kepler made the case for a sun-centered solar system rather than the Ptolemaic earth-centered system on the basis of mathematicsl simplicity, not on the ability to obtain a better match with observation—with enough adjustable parameters either system could be made to fit the data. The first observational evidence favoring the heliocentric (sun-centered) over the Ptolemiac (earth-centered) system was provided by the telescopic observations of Galileo Galilei, an Italian mathematician and astronomer born in 1564. Galileo made six historical astronomical discoveries that confirmed the Copernican earth-centered solar system: i) the light of the moon is sunlight reflected from the earth; ii) there were an inconceivable number of stars visible to the telescope that had never been visible before to the naked eye; iii) the stars, which could only be seen indistinctly, were much further away than the planets, which appeared as spheres; iv) the four moons of Jupiter that seem to revolve about it; v) the lunar-like phases of darkness and brightness of Venus; and vi) dark spots apparently moving across the sun are indications of its revolving. In the meantime the Copernican solar system model was submitted to a panel of Catholic theologians by the Pope, which concluded that it was “foolish and absurd in Philosophy, and formally heretical inasmuch as it contradicts the express position of Holy Scripture in many places”, and Galileo was summoned to the Inquisition and received confidential orders not to hold or teach Copernicanism in any way. Aristotle believed that terrestrial motion was determined by a body moving immediately to its proper location—earth below, then water, then air and finally fire above—and here the matter was left until the experimental study of terrestrial motion began with Galileo by timing the motion of balls down inclined planes since timing devices were not available to time bodies allowed to fall vertically. In 1656 Christian Huygens, a Dutch mathematician, invented the pendulum clock, based on Galileo’s observation that the time a pendulum takes for each swing is independent of the amplitude of the swing, which enabled him to calculate the acceleration of gravity and, presumably by observing the impact of swinging pendulums, to infer the laws of conservation of momentum and kinetic energy and to calculate the acceleration associated with motion on a curved path. Huygens thus refuted Aristotle and set the stage for Newton to bring the Scientific Revolution to its climax. Isaac Newton, an Englishman born in 1642, crossed the boundary between the natural philosophers, mathematicians and astronomical observers who had gone before and the modern scientist of today. His early work was on optics and demonstrated experimentally that white light is made up of light of all colors, each of which is bent a different amount when crossing an interface between different media. Newton also made a major advance in astronomy by inventing the reflecting telescope, but his great contribution was the synthesis from observation and mathematical calculation (he also invented the math—calculus) of a common theory of motion for celestial and terrestrial bodies as published in his Principia. A great contribution of the present book is to explain the Principia, which was written in Latin, translated into the English of several centuries ago, and argued mainly in geometry. Eventually Newton’s concept of scientific method prevailed because it provided universal principals, based on experimental observation and mathematical analysis, that allowed successful calculation of a great deal that was observed, not because it satisfied a pre-existing metaphysical criterion for a scientific theory. The author provides very interesting Technical Notes explaining how all these people from Aristotle to Newton actually calculated such things as the distance to the sun, the acceleration of gravity, etc. He treats later developments in science—electromagnetic theory, quantum mechanics, nuclear and elementary particle theory—in a brief epilogue. We can only hope that he decides to make it into a second volume at some point in the future.

To Explain the World is about the history of scientific philosophy. In this work, Nobel Prize winner Steven Weinberg discusses how science was viewed from ancient up until around the industrial revolution. It provides the reader with the history of scientific development and the accompanying philosophy of those developing scientific principles. Through the work the reader realizes how different the philosophy of science has been through time and how it has been a long and challenging journey to get to the discipline we consider science today.The author splits the book into four sections starting with the Greeks. There was of course science outside of Ancient Greece but the author focuses on Greece as they were where philosophy for the most part originated and as a consequence science had a philosophical underpinning. The author discusses Plato and the Pythagoreans but the first real Ancient Greek to approach physics as a subject was Aristotle. The author highlights how physics was not an empirical science and that the philosophy of science was still based on a platonic concept of the world in which the nature of physical exploration was a pondering of the ideals of nature. Thus Aristotle focused on the intention of physical objects as the moved through space and time. The scientist of today would find this a bit ridiculous but the author highlights how the goals of science were not to understand how the world actually works but to explore how the world ought to work.The author then moves on to astronomy and the description of the motion of the planets that were used in early days. The author goes back to the time of Thales but most of the focus is on Ptolemy. The author discusses the modification of the geocentric model of the universe to incorporate the planets as well as the incorporation of the modifications of the velocities of rotation of the planets. The author discusses the geometric methods used to measure the moon, earth and sun and how approximations were viewed. There are aspects of the writing which are clear and others which become hard to follow. The rather complete description of the Ptolemic model is not easy to follow and the author trivializes the difficulty in visualizing his words. There is an appendix in the back which helps clarify aspects but the writing is not as clear as it could be at times.The author then goes on to the middle ages with a focus on Arabic scholars. The formalizing of a number system and algebraic ideas led to development of some mathematics which simplified analysis for certain problems. But the author notes that the population did not have a modern conception of science. The author discusses medieval science and how Aristotle was reintroduced to the academic world. There were continued difficulties in reconciling science and religion but the reintroduction of classical literature was a step in the right direction that eventually led the way to a more modern scientific approach.The author finishes with an examination of the world of Galileo and Newton. The author discusses how the scientific method went from pondering what ought to be to what actually occurs and how measurement became an integral part of the scientific process. The author discusses how Kepler turned observation into mathematical relationships and how Newton figured out basic principles which led to the results Kepler empirically observed. This is the process of science that the author highlights as the turning point of how science was done. Of course Newton was a very mystical figure who was a pre-enlightenment scientist; the philosophy of science is due to the process he helped develop.To Explain the World is a concise history of the development of scientific thought in the West. The account shows how science went from armchair philosophizing to an empirical process. That being said the philosophy of science today is not precisely as the author seems to specify and within the scientific community there is a large portion who has refocused on thinking about the way the world would look most beautiful, in particular with string theory to the chagrin of many scientists. The evolution of the astronomy and the complexity of early models of the celestial sphere are interesting and the history of Aristotelian science on western thought is a good reminder. All in all the book is informative but I would not say it was always engaging and the authors views about what science is and how the philosophy of science is unrecognizable to the past is not entirely accurate given how mathematically abstract and untestable certain fields of physics are today.

In Memoriam:Steven Weinberg (May 3, 1933 – July 23, 2021)."From his students to science enthusiasts, from astrophysicists to public decision makers, he made an enormous difference in our understanding. In short, he changed the world." (UT Austin, 24 July 2021).I have mixed feelings regarding this book. I note that this book is quite a bit different from his 1977 book, The First Three Minutes. Back then, Steven Weinberg raised eyebrows in concluding that 1977 book with this line: "The effort to understand the Universe is one of the very few things that lifts human life a little above the level of farce, and gives it some of the grace of tragedy." (page 155). Let us read the conclusion to his 2015 book: "It is toward a more fundamental physical theory that the wide-ranging scientific principles we discover have been, and are being, reduced." (page 268). My point being that there really is no similarity between the two publications, which is apt to be cause for disappointment. I will not make that comparison any longer. Therefore, one must also read Weinberg's 1977 book !(1) My favorite portion of this book, To Explain The World, is one-hundred pages of "Technical Notes."If you couple these technical notes with the technical notes from the earlier "First Three Minutes" (first edition ! ), you will get insight into how a Nobel-winning Physicist approaches introductory physics. And, that is always nice to see. Read: "I will show how the results obtained by the natural philosophers of the past do follow from the observations and assumptions on which they relied, but without attempting faithfully to reproduce the details of their reasoning." You will sharpen geometry, algebra, trigonometry skills plus learn (or review) useful introductory physics.(2) Another aspect worth exploring is how Weinberg assesses the past through the lens of a modern day physicist. Thus, this is really not history. If you view it only as " history" you will walk away disappointed. Weinberg allows his opinions to intrude on the historical outlook. Initially, that turned me off. So, I reread the book, Weinberg writes: "it is the perspective of a modern working scientist on the science of the past" and "this book will emphasize physics and astronomy." (Preface). So, keep those things in mind, you will be disappointed if you expect more than is promised in the Preface. Finally, I let Steven Weinberg speak:(3) "My purpose here in judging the past by the standards of the present is to come to an understanding of how difficult it was for even very intelligent persons like Aristotle to learn how to learn about Nature, " (page 30) and "The real difference between Aristarchus and today's astronomers is not that his observational data were in error, but that he never tried to judge the uncertainty in them, or even acknowledged that they might be imperfect." (page 69) also, "It was work on the motion of falling bodies and the nature of air pressure that marked the real beginning of modern experimental physics."(page 190). Read: "Newton had given to the future a model of what a physical theory can be; a set of simple mathematical principles that precisely govern a vast range of different phenomena." (page 244) and "We learn to abandon the search for certainty, because the explanations that make us happy never are certain."(page 255).(4) Concluding my all too brief review. There is more to say and most of the Amazon reviewers have said it. There is little else I can profitably add to their discussion. Weinberg's book will not please every subset of readers, as the prose can be plodding. Recall, too, an earlier book: Chandrasekhar's Newton's Principia For The Common Reader. He also viewed Newton through the eyes of a modern lens (a monograph well worth studying). I never seriously thought about it (until re-reading Weinberg), but it is difficult (perhaps even impossible) for a working scientist to not be somewhat Whiggish: "judging the past according to our present," when looking backward. With those reservations, I do recommend reading this book.