Reviews for Cause, Experiment, and Science

The average rating for Cause, Experiment, and Science based on 2 reviews is 4 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2018-10-13 00:00:00 John Nash I am not worthy to review this book! Instead I'll briefly describe it. Long before Galileo started looking through a telescope and finding discrepancies from the opinions of the Church and Aristotelian philosophers up in the sky, he was already making enemies by finding problems with Aristotelian philosophy on the ground. His later claims about the earth orbiting the sun, etc., might not have got him in much trouble later if he hadn't already made enemies with this work on water and ice. Water and ice? A bit shocking that there could be any dispute about why ice floats on water more than 1800 years after Archimedes explained the principle of buoyancy. And yet it was a big deal. Archimedes, and Galileo, and modern scientists, say ice floats because it is less dense than water. But Aristotle said that freezing makes substances more dense. That is true of most liquids, but not water. Aristotelians wanted a nice simple system with no exceptions, so they insisted ice must indeed be more dense than water and so it floats for some other reason, namely it's shape. Flat things like chips of ebony or steel needles can indeed remain atop water if carefully placed there, and they said this is why ice floats. It boggles my mind to think they would argue this, when one can quite easily see that ice cut into any shape will still float. But, apparently, admitting that ice is less dense than liquid water would have invalidated large chunks of their system of philosophy. They were willing to admit that Aristotle was sometimes wrong about small details and that experiments could improve our understanding of the world. But this was going too far. Their whole edifice risked falling down, and they knew it. And then comes Galileo, who not only shows them to be wrong, but does it in a book in Italian, not Latin, so that the common man could read it. And they did read it: it was a best-seller. This book contains the complete text of Galileo's book about "Bodies that stay atop water" in a new translation in modern English. (The most recent previous translation was from 1661 and feels very outdated.) To this he adds a preface and end notes that explain why this book was important and explain points that would be missed by a modern reader because so much has changed in our way of thought in 400 years. And then he constructs a four-part dialog in Galileo's own style involving his characters Sagredo, Simplicio and Salviati reading and discussing Galileo's text (which is printed in red so that it stands out, also oddly echoing many red-letter versions of the New Testament). The Galilean text is very clear in many parts, but unclear in others. The dialog built around it helps to clarify and also to explain how the ideas would have appeared to contemporaries. Mr. Drake even goes so far as actually performing many of the experiments in the book and works his observations into the dialog. (These are experiments that you can easily perform yourself or in a classroom.) If Mr. Drake is correct, and I don't doubt it, this is a key moment in the development of modern science. Yet it has been woefully underappreciated. I checked wikipedia in four languages. The English page lists this in Galileo's writings but says nothing about it. The Italian version links to an online Italian text, but says nothing else. Spanish had one sentence. The French version has one very short paragraph, but does at least identify it as important. I guess it just doesn't have the same sense of drama as the fight with the church over heavenly bodies. (I only found this because I poke my nose into random little-free-libraries and sample the contents.) While I think this is an important work, and historians of science and philosophy should pay attention, it is not an exciting thing to read. It is much more interesting to read about this dispute than to actually read the original document. So I definitely recommend carefully reading the preface, skimming might be appropriate for the rest. I hope someone eventually writes a more engaging presentation of this material.

Review # 2 was written on 2016-05-24 00:00:00 Richard Tarrant Another textbook that i'm not really sure how to rate. My judgement may be clouded by my dislike of chemistry.