AFTER a career involving everything from building Mars robots to predicting wildfires to teaching courses on Freud, science philosopher Clark Glymour invites us to share his accumulated wisdom.
The resulting essays cover a dizzying range of topics, but Glymour has a central theme: that while statistics and computers have made science more powerful, they have also made it easier than ever for data to be misunderstood and abused. 鈥淲e have not yet quite absorbed the complexity of our own science or what our uncertainty about it means for practical policy,鈥� he writes.
The title essay draws parallels between the trial of Galileo and the accusations of scientific misconduct faced by University of Pittsburgh statistician Herbert Needleman over his lead-toxicity data. While this comparison is unconvincing, what could have been a tedious collection of musings turns out to be a sharp and thought-provoking book.
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Galileo in Pittsburgh
Harvard University Press