Reviews for Clever Trevor (Science Solves It)

The average rating for Clever Trevor (Science Solves It) based on 2 reviews is 3 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2019-07-18 00:00:00 Tommy Groves Mad geniuses occur more often in comic books than in real life, and it's always interesting to come across one. The clearest example I know is Fred Hoyle, who for a few years was considered one of the world's great scientists; during the 1950s, I understand that his name, at least in his native Britain, was synonymous with unconventional brilliance. Then everything fell apart. He resigned his prestigious Cambridge chair and began to write more and more eccentric books: infeasible defences of his beloved Steady State theory, anti-evolutionary tracts, near-Velikovskian explanations of the role of comets in human history. But even at his maddest, Hoyle is always fun to read. As the old joke has it, he may be crazy, but he's never stupid. After finishing Science and the Modern World, it's hard not to feel that Alfred North Whitehead is another example. There's no doubt about the genius part. Quite apart from being the co-author of Principia Mathematica, the nec plus ultra of famous books that no one has ever read, his dazzling mind is in evidence pretty much from page one. He just seems to know everything, and draws the most extraordinary connections. Why did the scientific world-view only arise in Europe? I had never before seen the argument that it can be traced back to the great Greek tragedians and their interpretation of an ineluctable Fate, but Whitehead makes it startlingly convincing. He gives a brisk tour of the development of thought across the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, and continues to astound. Here's someone who's equally at home with Thomist theology and the aesthetics of Langrange's equations, and happy to compare them. Needless to say, he's read everything in the original. In case you're in any doubt, he inserts little Greek and Latin phrases every now and then with a disarming naturalness. Until I was halfway through, I was scratching my head and wondering why the book wasn't better known; but it then becomes brutally apparent that all is not well. Whitehead has already offered some cogent objections to materialism, and I was wondering what he was going to suggest instead. The answer turns out to be a weird metaphysics which is never properly explained, and is, to be blunt, unreadable. Looking around, I see an account of Whitehead's Gifford Lectures, where only a dozen people turned up after the first installment (a normal audience was several hundred). It is easy to understand his audience's disappointment. The prose in the metaphysical sections is not quite like anything I have seen before. It's a little bit like symbolic logic, but there are no symbols, only words. It's a little bit like Kant, but Kant makes sense if you read him carefully, and this doesn't. It's almost physically painful to get through. I know there are people who think highly of it, and it's claimed to be the foundation of "process philosophy", which has a considerable following. Well, I'm curious to hear from people who understand process philosophy and can defend it. So why am I so sure that I'm not just missing the point? Perhaps I am, but I bought the book mostly because of the title and the fact that it contained chapters headed "Relativity" and "Quantum Mechanics". I was curious to know what this famous philosopher, writing in 1925, would have to say about those subjects. Had he in some way influenced their development? I'm afraid the answer is no. The two chapters are anodyne and utterly lacking in insight; they consist of superficial popular explanations and hooks to the eccentric metaphysics. When you compare them with the genuinely brilliant papers that Heisenberg, Schrödinger, Weyl and their colleagues were just about to publish, the contrast could not be greater. Weyl, in particular, was philosophically sophisticated: his Philosophy of Mathematics and Natural Science is in some ways the book this one would like to be. I don't want to scare you off. Whitehead's book is more often than not well-written, and it's quite difficult to put down if you enjoy this kind of thing; I read it in three days. He's a likeable person. But I do wonder what happened to him, and how other scientists and philosophers of the time reacted, and what the route was that transformed this bizarre nonsense into something that's now supposed to be a quasi-respectable subject. I must look around some more. Maybe there's a good biography?

Review # 2 was written on 2017-01-15 00:00:00 Brandi Boudoin Found this a bit frustrating in the end. Other reviewers have commented on the convoluted language, which I didn't find a problem early on in the text, but toward the end it becomes more and more of a problem. I had gained the impression that there are some very interesting ideas in Whitehead's philosophy, and I bought this book in the hope that it might prepare me for Process and Reality, but now I find it difficult to determine whether the ideas are as impressive or as interesting as I initially thought, so that I'm no longer sure whether Process and Reality will be worth my time.