LEARNING science means learning how to think like a scientist. Along with the facts, theories and techniques of your subject you also acquire habits of mind, ways of arguing and standards for evaluating data. The path to a degree is an initiation into a particular style of thought.
You won鈥檛 get much chance to reflect on this during a science course. The people who run it are constantly struggling to fit in what they regard as the essentials of an ever-expanding field. The exams they set will focus on the facts.
Yet it is the intellectual style you also learn that will stay with you long after the details of a subject are lost. So you probably owe it to yourself to pursue some of the larger questions. What other styles might there be? What is it like to use them? How do denizens of other scientific tribes and territories see the world?
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The search is on, then, for the one book 鈥� not too long, not too dense 鈥� which might start you off. Passing by any number of weightier tomes on the philosophy of science, could it be John Ziman鈥檚 Reliable Knowledge? This is still a good place to discover some of the things the sciences have in common. Ziman did enough good physics to earn him a fellowship of the Royal Society, but what he will be best remembered for is a string of elegant books on the logic and lore of science. This one, first published in 1978, is now available in Cambridge鈥檚 Canto paperback series. It is a very readable introduction to how communities of scientists forge their accounts of the world. His observations on topics such as metaphors and models, pattern recognition, world maps and pictures go some way towards answering those large questions. He is currently working on a sequel (鈥淓ven more reliable knowledge鈥� perhaps) which will take into account recent work in philosophy and sociology of science.
Another candidate might be John L. Casti鈥檚 Searching for Certainty, an exploration of how well we can turn explanation into prediction. Casti is a mathematician who writes large, satisfying books that synthesise science across a wide range of disciplines. For my money, this is his best work. Here he covers five kinds of forecasting: weather, living forms, stock market movements, war and whether arithmetical statements are provable. As the diversity suggests, just putting these into a common framework for analysis, let alone one that is easy to follow, is an impressive feat.
A new book offering a different slant on similar questions is Theodore M. Porter鈥檚 Trust in Numbers. This is the work of a historian who wants to know what generates the drive towards quantification that is as evident in economics as in physics. Porter delivers a fine, scholarly account of how numerical measurement is used both to standardise results and to communicate them unambiguously. Perhaps it is not immediately obvious how a work that dwells at length on accountants and actuaries, and on the rise of cost-benefit analysis, can be about scientific and technological expertise. If so, it is well worth finding out how Porter links them all together.
But what about the real foundations of knowledge? If you want to delve into the assumptions that make science possible at all 鈥� that the Universe is regular, comprehensible, law-abiding and that God speaks the language of mathematics 鈥� then John Barrow鈥檚 The World Within the World is a useful guide. Barrow is best known as a cosmologist, but he is as interested in how we fashion our understanding of the nature of things as in what that understanding is.
How we can know may ultimately set the limits of what we can know. Barrow鈥檚 slightly rambling exploration of such matters may not be to everyone鈥檚 taste, but there is much to ponder here and the erudition is impressive, even if it is a trifle wearing over the long haul.
Harder to find than Barrow, but equally worthwhile, is Martin Krieger鈥檚 Doing Physics, which was published just a few years ago. Krieger is a physicist, but he treats his own discipline as an anthropologist treats a foreign culture. The subtitle gives the flavour: 鈥淗ow Physicists Take Hold of the World鈥�.
Krieger lays bare the habits that underly the crafts and conventions of physics, the particular ways they operate on the world by restricting some degrees of freedom to focus on others. We find out about the world by poking at it, he writes, and his unique book is a reflection on how we control that intervention to make it yield understandable results. It needs to be read rather slowly, but it is only a third of the length of Barrow, and so that much more likely to be given the attention it deserves.
In the end, though, none of these quite fits the bill for that one book, spanning disciplines, which can be recommended to absolutely everyone. That book is Horace Freeland Judson鈥檚 economically composed The Search for Solutions, a writer鈥檚 attempt to depict the different ways in which scientists try to build their knowledge. More accessible than Krieger, less cluttered than Barrow, acknowledging a large debt to Ziman, it is easier to read than any of them.
Judson teaches epistemology by telling stories. His opening sentence tells you that 鈥渃ertain moments of the mind have a special quality of well-being鈥�.
He has written a beautifully poised book. Everything from the choice of examples to the simple chapter titles 鈥� Pattern, Change, Chance, Feedback, Modelling, Strong Predictions, Evidence, Theory 鈥� gives Judson a strong claim to fulfil a role sometimes sketched but rarely enacted: not just a science writer but a science critic. The drawback? Alas, it is out of print. However, Judson鈥檚 sprawling history of molecular biology, The Eighth Day Of Creation, has just been reissued by Penguin, so perhaps someone will see fit to do the same with this more economical and more general book.
Reliable Knowledge by John Ziman, Canto/Cambridge, pp 208, 拢6.95 pbk
Searching for Certainty by John L. Casti, Abacus, pp 496, 拢7.99 pbk
Trust in Numbers: The Pursuit of Objectivity in Science and Public Life by Theodore M. Porter, Princetown University Press, pp 310, 拢19.95/$24.95
The World Within the World by John Barrow, Oxford University Press, pp 412, 拢12.99 pbk
Doing Physics by Martin Krieger, Indiana University Press, pp 192, 拢27.50/$29.95 hbk, 拢9.99/$9.95
The Search for Solutions by Horace Freeland Judson, out of print
The Eighth Day of Creation by Horace Freeland Judson, Penguin pp 686, 拢12 pbk