To Explain the World: The Discovery of Modern Science

by Steven Weinberg

In To Explain the World, pre-eminent theoretical physicist Steven Weinberg offers a rich and irreverent history of science from a unique perspective - that of a scientist. Moving from ancient Miletus to medieval Baghdad to Oxford, and from the Museum of Alexandria to the Royal Society of London, he shows that the scientists of the past not only did not understand what we understand about the world - they did not understand what there is to understand. Yet eventually, through the struggle to solve such mysteries as the backward movement of the planets and the rise and fall of tides, the modern discipline of science emerged.

Genres: Science, History, Nonfiction, Physics, History Of Science, Philosophy, Popular Science

387 pages, Kindle Edition

First published February 1, 2015

About the author

Steven Weinberg (1933-2021) was an American theoretical physicist and Nobel laureate in Physics for his contributions with Abdus Salam and Sheldon Glashow to the unification of the weak force and electromagnetic interaction between elementary particles.

He held the Josey Regental Chair in Science at the University of Texas at Austin, where he was a member of the Physics and Astronomy Departments. His research on elementary particles and physical cosmology was honored with numerous prizes and awards, including in 1979 the Nobel Prize in Physics and in 1991 the National Medal of Science. In 2004 he received the Benjamin Franklin Medal of the American Philosophical Society, with a citation that said he was "considered by many to be the preeminent theoretical physicist alive in the world today." He was elected to the US National Academy of Sciences and Britain's Royal Society, as well as to the American Philosophical Society and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Weinberg's articles on various subjects occasionally appeared in The New York Review of Books and other periodicals. He served as consultant at the U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, President of the Philosophical Society of Texas, and member of the Board of Editors of Daedalus magazine, the Council of Scholars of the Library of Congress, the JASON group of defense consultants, and many other boards and committees.

Reviews

[Always Pouting · Rating 3 out of 5]

I was pretty excited to read this one and apparently the author is a lecturer on the history of science and put the book together through the notes he uses to prepare for teaching his class. There was a lot of new stuff in this book that I didn't know, especially about the development of math which really helped make sense of why we use calculus and such. I learned a lot. That said I wish the author had focused on more than just math and physics, I understand that as a physicist that it's easiest to talk about those two subjects first and foremost but I felt like it left out a lot of other things and didn't give me as complete a picture of the history of science and how we got to where we are today. The writing was also a little dull and the book took effort to make it through. Really interesting and educating but I think the author could've generalized and simplified a little bit more if he wanted to write a book written for the average reader.

[Brian Clegg · Rating 5 out of 5]

There was a time when one approached a popular science book by a 'real' working scientist with trepidation. There was little doubt they would get the science right, but the chances are it would read more like a textbook or dull lecture notes. Thankfully, there are now a number of scientists who make pretty good writers too, but one area they tend to fall down on in history of science. I've lost count of the number of popular science titles by working scientists (including, infamously also the reboot of the Cosmos TV show, hosted by Neil deGrasse Tyson) which roll out the tedious and incorrect suggestion that Giordano Bruno was burned for his advanced scientific ideas.

Luckily, though, Steven Weinberg, as well as being a Nobel Prize winning physicist for his work on the electroweak theory (and all round nice guy), has made something of a hobby of history of science and his accounts are largely well done. I might disagree with some of his emphasis, and there are a couple of arguable points when dealing with Newton, both in his introduction of centripetal force and in the claim that the Royal Society published Principia, but on the whole the history is sound.

Perhaps surprisingly for a modern physicist, whose working life has been focussed on the peculiarities of particle theory and the significance of symmetry, Weinberg chooses to write about the period when the scientific method was evolving. So he starts with the Ancient Greeks and runs through to Newton, with only a short summary chapter filling in everything else in physics.

I have given the book five stars because I think that Weinberg builds this structure beautifully, showing how very different the ancient ideas of natural philosophy were from natural science and explaining in far more detail than I've ever seen in a popular work how the different models of the universe (what we would now call the solar system) were developed through time, including really interesting points like the way that Ptolemy-style epicycles were maintained in the early Copernican era.

He is also very good on the period when Arab scientists did original work and brought the mostly forgotten Greek works to the attention of the world. Here he treads what feels a very sound line between the older tendency to play down the Arab contribution and the more recent tendency to allow this period more of a contribution than it really had. Weinberg is perhaps a little sparse in his appreciation of the medieval period, ignoring Grosseteste and only having a passing reference to one thing that Roger Bacon mentions, but again he then very much puts Descartes and Francis Bacon in their proper place, rather than giving too much weight to their work.

Reading this book you will find out a whole lot about Ancient Greek science plus the contributions of Galileo and Newton, and it will be a rewarding read. Don't expect a lot of context - there is only very sketchy biographical information - so the content can be a little dry in places, but Weinberg's impressive grasp of the gradual evolution of the scientific method more than makes up for this.

The only slight surprise was that the book is significantly shorter than it looks. The main text ends on page 268 of 416. The rest (apart from the index) is a series of 'technical notes' which are effectively textbook explanations of various developments in physics from some Greek basics through to Newtonian matters like planetary masses and conservation of momentum. I'll be surprised if 1 in 100 readers makes it through these.

So, highly recommended if you want a history of the development of physics from ancient Greece through to Newton with a lot of detail on the way that both the model of the solar system and the basics of mechanics were developed in that period. Weinberg's writing may be a little dry with its lack of biographical context, but it is rarely dull as he keeps the ideas flying.

[Mohamed al-Jamri · Rating 4 out of 5]

إسم الكتاب: لشرح العالم - اكتشاف العلم الحديث
الكتاب: ستيفين واينبيرج
عدد الصفحات: ٤٣٢
سنة النشر: ٢٠١٥



يتناول هذا الكتاب موضوع تاريخ العلم منذ العصور القديمة حتى نيوتن بشكل شبه تفصيلي، فلا هو يرتقي لمستوى الكتب الجامعية (تكتس بوكز) ولا هو بسطحية بعض الكتب التي تعطي صورة مبسطة جدًا وتتجاوز كثير من التفاصيل المهمة. يقسم الكتاب مراحل تقدم العلم إلى ثلاث مراحل، الأولى مرحلة الحضارة الإغريقية، والثانية مرحلة الحضارة الإسلامية والعصور الوسطى الأوروبية والثالثة مرحلة العلم الحديث والثورة الكوبرنيكية.

الحضارة الإغريقية

يحرص الكاتب منذ البداية على تبيان أن كثيرًا من العلوم التي عند الإغريق كانوا قد ورثوها من حضارات أخرى كالحضارة المصرية والصينية والهندية وطبعًا بلاد ما بين الرافدين، ولكنه يؤكد على التفريق بين ما كان يمارس في هذه الحضارات وبين الحضارة الإغريقية والتي حاول علماؤها على عكس من سبقوهم إيجاد تفسيرات مادية بحتة للظواهر الطبيعية بعيدًا عن التوسل بالآلهة أو القوى فوق الطبيعية. ويتطرق الكاتب أيضًا لعلاقة العلم مع الدين في هذا العصر.

تبدأ قصتنا هنا مع المدرسة الأيونية -وهي مدينة تقع في غرب آسيا الصغرى (تركيا) على ضفاف البحر الأبيض المتوسط- وبالتحديد مع طاليس في القرن السادس قبل الميلاد وهو بالمناسبة نفس العصر الئي عاش فيه بوذا وكونفوشوس. يذكر أن طاليس كان قد اعتبر من حكماء اليونان السبعة بعد أن تنبأ بكسوف الشمس وقد قال أن الماء هو أساس كل الموجودات الأخرى، ثم ننتقل لأنيكساماندر الذي قال أن أساس كل شيء هو "اللامتناهي" ومن ثم لأنيكسيمينيز الذي قال أن الهواء هو أصل كل شيء وهرقليطس الذي قال أن النار هي أصل العالم. هل لاحظت النسق؟

كل واحد من هولاء يقول أن شيئًا ما هو أصل كل شيء وهذا يتكرر مع الإغريقيين الآخرين من مختلف المدارس، فهناك ديموقرطس وأستاذه لوسيفس الذين قالوا بأن كل شيء يتكون من الذرات وهي أصغر جزء في المادة لا يمكن تقطيعه أكثر من ذلك (ملاحظة، تم إطلاق هذه التسمية على الذرات عندما اكتشفها العلم الحديث ولكن تبين بعد ذلك أنها تتكون من جزيئات أصغر هي البروتونات والنيوترونات والالكترونات) وقال إمبيديكليس أن هناك أربعة عناصر تكون الكون هي الماء والنار والأرض والهواء في تشابه قريب مع قصة الخلق المذكورة في القرآن، حيث يخلق الجن من النار والإنسان من الطين (ماء + أرض) ومن ثم تنفخ فيه الروح (الهواء). وهناك المزيد من هؤلاء المفكرين يتطرق لهم الكاتب

إن العامل المشترك بين هؤلاء حسب رؤية الكاتب هو أن أيًا منهم لم يسعَ لإعطاء تبريرات أو أسباب للنتائج التي وصلوا لها لذلك يرى أنه يجب النظر لهم كشعراء وليس علماء أو فلاسفة. تبدأ بعد هذا مرحلة العلماء الحقيقيين فنجد فيثاغورث صاحب النظرية الشهيرة، وأرسطو الفيلسوف الأشهر، وإقليسدس صاحب كتاب العناصر أحد أهم كتب الرياضيات في التاريخ، وأرستاخس الذي قال بدوان الأرض حول الشمس، وأرخميدس وبطليموس وغيرهم. يتطرق الكاتب لأهم إنجازات هذا العصر والتي ستكون صادمة لمن لم يقرأ عنه من قبل فقد تضمنت هذه الإنجازات إثبات كروية الأرض ومحاولة قياس حجمها وبعدها عن الشمس والقمر وقياس حجم كل منهما. وقد كان هناك نموذجان يصفان الكون، موذج أرسطو ونموذج بطليموس وكلاهما يضعان الأرض في المنتصف إلا أن قياسات نموذج بطليموس كانت هي الأدق حيث قام بوضع مدارات داخلية للكواكب بالإضافة لمداراتها حول الشمس. كلا النموذجين بقيا قيد الاستخدام لأكثر من ألف سنة حتى جاء عصر العلم الحديث.

العصور الوسطى

كانت التقدمات العلمية في هذه الفترة متواضعة مقارنة بسابقتها إلا أنها كانت مهمة لحفظ علوم الإغريق والإضافة عليها وهو ما مهد الطريق لعصر العلم الحديث. أبرز محطة هنا هي الحضارة الإسلامية فقد لبغت هذه الحضارة عصرها الذهبي العلمي في عصر هارون الرشيد وابنه المأمون الذين شجعا حركة الترجمات والتي تركزت في بغداد وبيت الحكمة وهي أكبر مكتبة في العالم حينها. يقارن الكاتب هذا بالوضع الأوروبي حينها عندما كانت الأمية هي السمة الغالبة على الأوروبيين بينما كانت الحضارة الإسلامية تزخر بالعلم حتى أصبحت العربية هي لغته.

لم يبلغ أي من العلماء العرب -وهذا لفظ يعمم به الكاتب على علماء الحضارة الإسلامية- مبلغ جاليليو ونيوتن ولكنهم مع ذلك قدموا الكثير للعلم، فهذا الخوارزمي الذي وضع أسس علمي الخوارزمية والجبر ونقل الأرقام الهندية للعربية حتى صارت تعرف لاحقًا عند الغرب بالأرقام العربية، والبتاني الذي جاء بعلم المثلثات والصوفي الذي يعد أول من رصد مجرة أخرى والبيروني الذي قال بدوران الأرض وأسهم بتطوير علم المثلثات، وهناك الكثيرون أيضًا يتطرق لهم الكاتب من أمثال عمر الخيام وابن الهيثم وجابر بن حيان والكندي والرازي وابن سينا وابن باجه وابن طفيل وابن رشد وآخرين.

يذكر الكاتب أن العربية هي أصل الكثير من الكلمات العلمية مثل الخوارزمية والجبر والكحول والقلويات وكذلك أسماء عدد كبير من النجوم. انقسم العلماء إلى قسمين، فالفلكيون اتبعوا بطليموس لدقة قياساته والأطباء اتبعوا أرسطو الذي كان أفضل نتاجه العلمي في البيولوجيا. يختلف المؤرخون حول تاريخ انتهاء العصر الذهبي الإسلامي فهناك من يرى انتهاءه مع ضعف الدولة العباسية والغزو المغولي والحملات الصليبية وهنا من يرى أنه استمر إلى ما بعد ذلك. يذكر الفريق الثاني وجود علماء كبار وجدوا بعد هذه الفترة من أمثال الطوسي، الشيرازي وابن الشاطر، بينما يقول الفريق الأول أن وتيرة العلم تباطأت بشكل كبير في هذه الفترة. المفكر اللبناني جورج صليبا الذي يعمل محاضرًا في جامعة كولومبيا الأمريكية من الفريق الثاني وقد ألف عدة كتب في الموضوع أرجو أن أقرأها في المستقبل.

في نفس هذه الفترة تغرق أوروبا في ظلام هيمنة الكنيسة الكاثولوكية بعد إغلاق المدارس الفلسفية الإغريقية التي اعتبرت إشغالًا للناس عن الدين، وفي المقابل كانت هناك مدارس دينية انشغلت فيها كبار العقول بالجدال حول عدد الملائكة الذين يمكن أن يقفوا على رأس إبرة دفعة واحدة! ولكن التغيير كان قادم فبعض هذه المدارس بدأ بتدريس العلوم وبدأت حركة ترجمة الكتب العربية للاتينية ولاحقًا من الإغريقية للاتينية مباشرةً. أكبر إنجاز في هذه الفترة كان للقديس توماس الإكويني الذي نجح في تقريب ودمج فكر أرسطو مع الفكر الكنسي وبذلك تم رفع الرقابة بعض كتبه ولو أن الرقابة كانت تعود بين فترة وأخرى. يعتبر الكاتب أن هذه الرقابة وفي نفس الوقت الذي سمحت فيه قمعت فيه فكر أرسطو أحيانًا، فإنها سمحت له بالنشر أحيانًا أخرى، وهذا منع أن يتفرد فكر هذا الرجل العظيم بالعقول بشكل تام، فأصبح بالإمكان التحرر من الفكر الكنسي من جهة ومن فكر أرسطو من جهة أخرى وهنا بدأت الثورة العلمية

الثورة العلمية

أبطال هذه المرحلة هم كابيرنيكون وجاليليو وكيبلر ونيوتن. ولكنها لم تكن ثورة بالمعنى المتعارف، فهذه الثورة امتدت لأكثر من مئة عام. مهد لها المفكرون من المرحلة السابقة، لتصل الشعلة إلى كوبيرنكوس، ذلك القس البولندي الذي ألف كتابًا طرح فيه فكرة مركزية الشمس وقال أن هذا النموذج أبسط من نموذج توليمي في الحسابات وأهدى كتابه هذا إلى البابا في روما. لم يتم حظر الكتاب ولكن الناشر أضاف مقدمة فيه ذكر أن نظرية مركزية الشمس لا يجب الأخذ بها وأنها مجرد عملية حسابية غير متصلة بالواقع. لهذا لم يتم حظر الكتاب منذ إصداره في العام 1543 حتى العام 1600 وهي السنة التي أحرق فيها جيوردانو برونو بسبب نشره للهرطقات والتي كان من ضمنها دوران الأرض حول الشمس.

في هذه المرحلة يبزغ نجم العالم الإيطالي جاليلي جاليليو الذي صنع أول تلسكوب ومن خلاله تمكن من الحصول على قياسات دقيقة للنجوم أثبتت تفوق نظرية دوران الأرض حول الشمس على نظرية ثبات الأرض, ولم يكتف جاليليو بهذا فوضع قوانين للسقوط الحر وشاهد أقمار المشتري ومراحل زحل التي تشبه مراحل القمر (هلال، بدر الخ) وكذلك البقع السوداء في الشمس. بل وألف كتابًا يقول فيه بعدم تعارض العلم مع الدين وبوجوب تأويل النصوص التي تقول بثبات الأرض. هذه النقطة كانت نقطة خلافه مع الكنيسة التي أصدرت عليه حكمًا بعدم الكتابة أو الدفاع عن نظرية دوران الأرض حول الشمس، ولكن بعد عدة سنين نشر كتابًا بهذا المضمون فكان الحكم عليه بالإقامة الجبرية وأرغم على التنصل علانيةً من نظرية دوران الأرض حول الشمس بعد أن عرضت أدوات التعذيب أمامه والتي كانت تستخدم في محاكم التفتيش الشهيرة!

أما كيبلر الذي عاصر جاليليو وكان على تواصل معه، فقد حسّن من نظرية دوران الأرض حول الشمس معتمدًا على بيانات فلكية حصل عليها من الفلكي الدنماركي تيكو براهي، فقام بتعديل مدارات الكواكب من الشكل الدائري إلى البيضاوي قليلًا وبذلك وافقت النظرية الواقع بشكل أتم. يقلل الكاتب من دوري ديكارت وفرانسيس بيكون في الثورة العلمية ولكنه لا يبخسهما حقهما، ويقول أن كثير من مؤرخي العلم أعطوهما أكبر مما يستحقان.

نصل الآن إلى قمة الثورة العلمية مع عبقري زمانه دون منازع، إنه السير اسحاق نيوتن. هذا الشاب غريب الأطوار الذي لم يسافر خارج حدود مدينته قط، وانهمك في دراسة الخيمياء وبحث الأسرار الرقمية للكتاب المقدس والذي اعتبر أن أكبر إنجاز في حياته هو أنه لم يمارس الجنس قط! هذا الشاب هو نفسه الذي طور علوم الميكانيكا والرياضيات والبصريات والجاذبية لدرجة غير مسبوقة. نتعرف إلى قصة حياته وإلى القصة الشهيرة التي حدثت بينه وبين العالمين هالي وهوك والنزاع الذي حصل بينه وبين ليبنتز. يختم الكاتب بعد ذلك بسرد سريع للتطورات العلمية من بعد ذلك للعصر الحديث. مع بعض النقاشات الفلسفية حول طبيعة العلم.

التقييم العام

هذا الكتاب دقيق في كثير من المعلومات الوادرة فيه وهو يتجنب التسطيح الكبير في بعض الكتب العلمية الأخرى والتي تؤدي لتحريف المعلومات. يتحرى الكاتب الدقة في كلامه ولكن هذه الدقة لم تكن مصحوبة بنفس القدر من التشويق، فأسلوب الكاتب كان جافًا بعض الشيء ومشوقًا بعض الشيء. يحسب للكاتب تفصيله لمرحلة العلم في الحضارة الإسلامية والتي إذا لم تهمل بشكل مطلع في غالبية الكتب، فإنها لا تحظى إلا بذكر سريع. نقاشات الكاتب الفلسفية حول طبيعة العلم والدروس المستفادة من التاريخ في غاية الروعة وكذلك أسلوبه في تبيان كيفية الترجيح بين النظريات المختلفة وأهمية الاستفادة من دروس التاريخ لتطوير ممارستنا للعلم.

[Chris · Rating 1 out of 5]

Stephen Weinberg, Nobel Prize-winning physicist for his work on the electroweak force, author of textbooks on cosmology, gravity, general relativity, and quantum field theory, writer of several popular books of popular science, here—at the age of 82—uncharacteristically offers his readers and fans not a work of greatness but a high school-level, superficial, simplistically argued, unoriginal overview of the history of science from the Greeks through Newton. Unexpectedly from an author of his calibre, this is not a prize winning work.

This nearly complete failure of a book, with its flat, uninteresting text, will not inspire non-scientists to embrace the field. For curious readers, it fails to explain even simple concepts in the main text, instead awkwardly referring readers to the "Technical Notes" at the end which are nevertheless insufficient. They give the reader only an illusion of understanding. To really grasp the science, you will have to look it up on Wikipedia or elsewhere. The main text is entirely devoid of illustrations, and are only barely adequate in the Notes.

For working scientists the book offers nothing. It's not a textbook; it's not a reference; and it's certainly not a model of good popular science writing.

Its frequent platitudes deliver a work of astounding commonplaceness. The problems begin with the two opening sections on Greek Physics and Astronomy. Weinberg unnecessarily goes out of his way to list the names and dates of countless Greeks of the Classical and Hellenistic periods, each with a few summary sentences describing their ideas: this cataloging is the worst kind of history.

We are treated to all the usual characters: Thales, Anaximander, Anaximenes, Anaxagoras, through Hipparchus and finally Eratosthenes when the world finally learned how big it is. Most readers will already realize the only reason they are presented is to get us to Aristotle, Ptolemy and that other one (I forgot his name) who first thought that the Earth revolved around the sun, which we know, while reading, will connect us to Copernicus a thousand years later. All the other characters serve as space-filler supporting these biggies.

At this point, readers will wonder "What's new here? I have already heard all this before in high school. When is Weinberg going to tell me something new?" Sadly, he never does.

Continuing forward then, he moves to the Romans, who, compared to the Greeks, didn't contribute all that much to science, so that era was glossed over to get to the Middle Ages. Weinberg again repeats his performance with the Greeks: a list of minor characters which support the linear push toward Copernicus—with the rising specter of the Church adding potential interest to the tale. There are a whole bunch of monks copying Greek and Latin texts, and a lot of Arabs translating Aristotle. Again, there is no new material, or even original analyses, presented here. Instead, we read: "Whatever the scientific revolution was or was not, it began with Copernicus." Really? Wow!

Then, on to the chapters about the discovery of science, where the reader hopes it will finally get interesting. Weinberg unoriginally claims this happened when time-honored explanations of the natural order developed solely from observation were for the first time augmented by experimentation. Thus, any high school graduate will wonder "Is this book written for adults? Maybe it's for educationally-challenged people from Texas? I learned all this in eight grade when I had to do that horrible Observation-Hypothesis-Experiment-Revision-Experiment-Conclusions thing over and over again! Yeah, Galileo and his Leaning Tower and his telescope! I must be as smart as Mr. Weinberg!"

By this point the reader is either feeling pretty good that he already knows what a Nobel prize guy is lecturing him on—or, like me, he is wondering why he is wasting his time and money on this book.

The final (final?) chapter is about Newton and his synthesis of all that came before into the first non-trivial scientific theories, those of light and gravity, complete with explanatory and predictive power. Weinberg had a chance to rise to the topic, it now being much closer to his own life's work. To his credit he does, but not without the worst sophomoric statements in the entire book. What follows below is an outline of the Newton chapter, highlighted by quoting some of these simplistic utterances.

He breathlessly begins the last chapter with: "With Newton we come to the climax of the scientific revolution. But what an odd bird to be cast in such a historic role! ... Until middle-age he was never close to any woman, not even to his mother. " Oh, my god. One wonders how, and with whom, Newton's climax occurred, if it did at all.

Then, "It was Newton's theories of motion and gravitation that had the greatest historical impact." Really??? I never knew that, nor did any of his readers! We're sure happy he told us that; it led to the belated realization that this is actually a children's book—minus the sorely needed pretty pictures.

Showing evenhandedness to other scientists, he must not, and does not, acknowledge Newton as the "god" many thought he was: "Newton's theory did not meet universal acceptance." But why is that different from any new theory from any other scientist an any time in history?

Hitting him a little bit harder: "General relativity rejects Newton's notion of absolute space and time." Thank you for that, Mr. Weinberg. Since you ended your book with Newton, and didn't continue through to Einstein, we stupid readers wouldn't have known that—unless we had already learned it from other, less patronizing teachers.

Now, astonishingly, at the end of Newton's final chapter, Weinberg undermines the entire purpose of his book (on page 253) with the howler: "A question remains: why did the scientific revolution of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries happen when and where it did?" What? Come again? Maybe Weinberg didn't expect that many would read his Preface to the book, but I did. There he states "My focus in this book...is how we came to learn how to learn about the world." This recursive sentence is nevertheless quite clear. I'll grant that he explains a limited form of "how" simply as the onset of experimentation. But "how" is answered sufficiently only if the "why" "when" and "where" are also addressed. As Weinberg admits, he leaves these unanswered. That's a major failure.

(Just like the criminally unfulfilled promises that Volkswagen would deliver "clean diesels" to its customers, I want my money back from Weinberg because he didn't deliver what he promised, either.)

He should have stopped at that point, but Weinberg appends an epilogue, I'm guessing because pre-publication reviewers complained about the abrupt end at Newton, leaving unaddressed the following centuries, even Weinberg's substantial, accomplished research. In this section, readers are told about the controversial topic of scientific reductionism, where the work of Newton and later physicists was increasingly invoked to explain everything from biology and cosmology, to god and morality. I'll leave it at that, except to mention that Weinberg writes more banalities in this section, such as: "Faced with a puzzling world, people in every culture have sought explanations." Duh... does it take a Nobel prize winner to figure that out? Wouldn't nearly all of us known that already? We are then hit with a blazingly obvious declaration about Darwin: "It took a long time for natural selection to be accepted as a mechanism for evolution." ...wait...wait...clunk!

Could it get any worse? Yes. At the closing line in the book the reader suddenly realizes why Weinberg brought up Darwin in the first place. That earlier reference set the stage for this engineered line, one of some embarrassment, and one of the worst I can recall in any work of science: "It is toward a more fundamental physical theory that the wide-ranging scientific principles we discover have been, and are being, reduced."

Does that graceful sentence ring a bell? It should. Even done as as a joke (which I am not inclined to think it was since the rest of the book is entirely devoid of humor) ending this forgettable book by corrupting the eternally famous last line of Darwin's On the Origin of Species is in bad taste at best. And it's insulting if done to add some ill-defined kind of gravitas or authority to Weinberg's mediocre book.(*)

There's a good object lesson here for future science writers: don't take a series of poorly conceived lecture notes and expect it will make a great book. Few have done this successfully: for example, Richard Feynman's likely unsurpassable The Feynman Lectures on Physics, and (although not quite at the same level) Leonard Susskind's ongoing series which so far includes The Theoretical Minimum: What You Need to Know to Start Doing Physics and Quantum Mechanics: The Theoretical Minimum. Weinberg's lightweight, ephemeral, "To Explain the World" is nowhere near the status and significance of those.

Hey, you scientists out there! I'm speaking to you now. You are allowed to write deep, challenging books for intelligent readers. Show us what you got! Don't be afraid to go over our heads. Force us to think, to improve our minds! Write about what you know, about your expertise. Don't write to the lowest common denominator, which in the United States is a very low level indeed. At the same time, don't patronize those less educated. Whose book do you think will still be read 500, or 50—or dare I say 5?—years from now: Darwin's or Weinberg's? You can pick only one, good luck.

-----------------------

*Charles Darwin's most famous quote of all, from his most famous book in of a full lifetime of scientific works, is the last line of On the Origin of Species: "There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved."

By the way, notice that I didn't bring up Darwin first, he did. After that, the associated criticism was fair game. I can't fathom the audacity of any author, Nobel Prize or not, using a corrupted version of that exquisite quote for any purpose, let alone to close his own inferior book. It is consoling to reflect on the near-certain probability that any such book, as is certainly the case here, will be forgotten in a few years, while Darwin's will live on to the end of human civilization in one form or another.

[Mansoor · Rating 4 out of 5]

A history of the development of physical ideas, written by one of the greatest physicists of all-time. The book is also an essential treatise on the methodology of science.

[Jamie Smith · Rating 4 out of 5]

Steven Weinberg is a physicist and Nobel Prize winner at the University of Texas, and in To Explain the World he discusses the development of math and physics from the ancient Greeks to Isaac Newton.

The Greeks tried to understand the world using logic and deduction; experimentation was not part of their methodology. They were not scientists in the way that we use that term today, or as Weinberg says, “it is better to think of them not as physicists or scientists or even philosophers, but as poets.”

These early attempts to understand the world were more useful as a framework for thought than as practical science, but could occasionally rise to greatness, as when Eratosthenes calculated the circumference of the earth to within 1.4% of its actual value. Weinberg’s discussion of this shows that Eratosthenes actually made several incorrect assumptions in his calculation, but as luck would have it they ended up canceling each other out and decreasing the amount of error rather than increasing it.

Claudius Ptolemy is often remembered today as the just the guy who got astronomy wrong, assuming the earth rather than the sun was the center of the solar system (and the universe, for that matter). This does him an injustice, because he was one science’s greatest minds. In an age before telescopes allowed precise observations an earthcentric cosmology was a reasonable assumption, and it should not be forgotten that the Ptolemaic system did allow for reliable predictions of the locations of the planets and times of eclipses. Complicating things was that Ptolemy was constrained by philosophy and history to maintain that all orbits must be perfect circles. His solution was complicated but brilliant, and Weinberg does a fine job explaining all the adjustments he had to make in order for the calculations to turn out correctly. There are deferrents and equants, and of course, epicycles. It is a remarkable system, complicated yet elegant, and it was used used successfully for fourteen hundred years.

The book does a good job reminding us of the debt we own to Islamic civilization for saving many of the great works of Greek and Roman science, philosophy, and literature. More than just preserving, they expanded upon them with commentaries and new mathematical tables. It was one of history’s tragedies that the ruling Islamic dynasty which had supported science was overthrown by an ignorant, superstitious clan who suspected that all knowledge outside the Qu’ran was heretical, and suppressed the centers of science and learning. Weinberg makes the wry comment, “while al-Rashid and al-Ma'mun were delving into Greek and Persian philosophy, their contemporaries in the West, Charlemagne and his lords, were reportedly dabbling in the art of writing their name." This is actually unfair to Charlemagne; although he never learned to write (reading and writing are separate skills), he was fluent in both his native Old High German and Latin, and could understand spoken Ancient Greek.

Moving into the Middle Ages and Renaissance the book gives credit to the thinkers who were starting to delve more deeply into the workings of the world. With Galileo and Copernicus Weinberg explains what they saw and how they interpreted things. One of the unresolved questions of the Ptolemaic system was the phases of Venus; the planet obviously gets brighter and dimmer through the year, something Ptolemaic cosmology could not account for, but which had a simple explanation if both the Earth and Venus orbit the sun. For all his brilliance Galileo too was still constrained by history and convention into maintaining that orbits must be circular, and it took Copernicus to recognize that they are elliptical. Religion, both Catholic and Protestant, exerted a baleful influence on scientific progress: Copernicus’s views were not published until after his death, and Galileo’s persecution by the Church is well known (an excellent book on this subject is The Crime of Galileo by Giorgio de Santillana).

The book ends with Newton and his world-changing discoveries. There is a discussion of who invented calculus, Newton or Liebnitz, with the conclusion that it seemed to have been discovered independently by both men, but each of them engaged in rather sordid and underhanded dealings in trying to promote their own claims. It is also interesting that Newton’s famous three laws of motion were never stated in the form we are familiar with today; it took decades before someone extracted the pithy statements we know from Newton’s obscure and cumbersome Latin prose. Nevertheless Newton changed everything, and although there was some resistance to his Principia Mathematica, most intellectuals immediately recognized as the groundbreaking work it was. The Ptolemaic system was finally retired by the more accurate Newtonian cosmology, but even that did not account for some of the movements of planets. A great deal of additional work was required. For instance, it was by observing deviations in Uranus’s orbit that the planet Neptune was first predicted and then discovered. And in the twentieth century, Einstein’s theories of relativity helped resolved some additional irregularities in the Newtonian predictions.

At the end of the text there are about a hundred pages of math and physics explaining the logic underpinning many of the ideas discussed in this book. They are pitched at the level of high school math and science, but are good refreshers for people who have have not thought about such things in years.

I found the book interesting and informative. Other reviewers, with a more technical approach to the text, seem to have found it inadequate in many areas. For those with a general interest in the subject Weinberg provides a good introduction, but those who are already physicists, mathematicians, or astronomers are not likely to learn anything new.

[Bettie · Rating 4 out of 5]

Bettie's Books

The rating, any status updates, and those bookshelves, indicate my feelings for this book.

[Terry · Rating 2 out of 5]

To Explain the World is an uninteresting walk through the development of our understanding of the solar system. The book purports to do other things but really the majority of its bulk centers around this point. Normally, I love history of science, but this book is both slow and lacks insight. Avoid this book.

The book grows out of the lecture notes for a course the author instructed and the text very much has that feel. The text feels like an outgrowth from a not particularly good outline and this has left holes. Usually, a book offers insights that a course would not. Some sense of the grand overview and the book only pokes at these. The author is a Nobel prize winning physicist which would suggest he'd be better able to talk about why something is important. The book also stops shortly after the beginning of the scientific revolution with no fanfare. Discussions on how the nature of science has changed don't appear substantively.

On the plus side, the book isn't bad. The writing is clear and the coverage of Arab science is better than most treatments. There's good coverage of the fight between Socratic and Aristotelian astronomy which is almost interesting.

Again, there are few people I could recommend this book to.

[Daniel Clausen · Rating 5 out of 5]

I don't think I have the patience or the background in science to understand this book. I had to read this book much slower than I would have liked. In addition, I had to puzzle over parts of it a few times before I got it. In some instances, I didn't get the material. That being said, I think this would have been a great read had I had some background in the material beforehand. Perhaps this is a "read again later on down the line" type of book. In any event, I wouldn't hesitate to recommend this book to people who love the history of science.

[Siv30 · Rating 3 out of 5]

ספר די דחוס שעוסק בהיסטוריה והפילוסופיה של התפתחות האסטרונומיה, הפיזיקה והמתמטיקה מאז ימי היוונים ועד היום.

חלקים מהספר מרתקים בעיקר המאבקים במאות ה 16 וה 17 בין המדע והדת. אבל חלקים מהספר משמימים ועוסקים בניתוח מדוקדק עד זרא של תיאוריות כושלות כולל תיאור רכיבים פיזיקליים ומתמטיים שאין לי שמץ מושג בהם וגם אין לי שמץ אם אכן הטענות של המחבר נכונות או לא כי אין לי יכולת לבחון אותן.

הוא מתעמק ביחוד באסטרונומיה ומדגים טעויות בתיאוריות של אריסטו, תלמי, טיכו ברכה ואז הוא גם מדגים את הנקודות בהן קופרניקוס וגלילאו צדקו עד כדי כך שהוא במשך פרקים מספק הוכחות שלמות.

אבל הוא לא מסתפק בכך. הוא עובר לתיאוריות בפיזיקה ומנתח את התיאוריות של דקרט וניוטון בשלב הזה אני הייתי על סף שבירה. אין לי שמץ של מושג על מה הוא שח כשהוא מסביר מדוע נכשלה התיאוריה של דקרט על היווצרות הקשת כי הוא אומנם נשמע בהיר ואני יכולה לספר שמשהו בחישובים על זווית שבירת הקרניים לא היה תקין, אבל זה כמו לדבר אנגלית סינית. יש תחושה של הבנת המילים אבל לא מבינים את המשפטים והתמונה עצמה נשארת מפוקסלת עד לא הכר.

בחלקים של ההיסטוריה והפילוסופיה של המדע, תחומים שאני מתמצאת בהם, הוא היה בעיניי בהיר ומעניין ולכן הענקתי לו 3 כוכבים. ביתר החלקים אין לי מושג.

[Luke · Rating 2 out of 5]

Rewrite: 3/2021 (kept the overall content but toned down the criticism)

I gave this book 2 stars based on my opinion that the most valuable elements in a condensed book on the history of science (made for the general public) are:
1. The author's selective inclusion of subjects/scientists
2. The author's detailed analysis of the key scientists' achievements relative to the overall progress of his field or science in general.
3. The author's analysis and commentary on the "story" of science. I.e. factors contributing to the beginning of science and it's continued progress, the abolition of science during the dark ages, and the revival starting during the Renaissance which led to modern day science.

For point #1:
I did not see any glaring omission or puzzling inclusion, so I did not dock any points here. Full disclosure, I only look for the really big hitters here, and I'm far from an expert on the history of science. A few notes for potential readers:
- The subject matter is only astronomy and other classical physics (e.g. no biology, chemistry, or electricity/magnetism until the short epilogue).
- It is only up through Newton.

For point #2:
I did not get a real sense of how difficult the discoveries discussed must have been. That is, I did not get a good sense of how a problem looked to the scientist given his time period. There are some comments on observation difficulties that were overcome by brilliance, but there are only brief comments, not much detail. There is no clear explanation in the building up of scientific concepts, or a clear explanation of what a specific scientist was working with upon starting his work. There are a lot of math explanations, so perhaps there is some insight that can be derived here that I missed, but I didn't follow it. Without this, the history almost reads as a list, jumping from great scientist to great scientist, talking about their discoveries and explaining some math.

In close connection with above, I also didn't get a real understanding of the significance of any particular discovery for the progression of science. The author may state that '"such and such" a discovery was the first of its kind, but beyond these statements, there is really nothing to go on.

With respect to broad opinions on positive and negative influences on science progression beyond just immediate discoveries:
The author seems to stay as neutral as possible with individual scientists and thinkers outside of their discoveries. Aristotle is the one major exception to this rule. The author is highly critical of Aristotle, which to me is very disappointing, especially since the author takes a lot of time on Aristotle. After the first few chapters, I was ready to try and ignore this, as the author claimed to be more neutral with respect to Aristotle than other modern physicists, but throughout the book, Aristotle's errors in science and negative influences are mentioned whenever they can be squeezed in. The author's view on Aristotle came across as definitely negative despite early statements and the overall neutrality kept with other scientists (more about this in point #3).

Other significant (non-neutral) commentary is very short and includes opinions on:
- Plato = negative (agree)
- Short on Bacon, Descartes = negative
- Very short on Aquinas = positive? Which makes the author's viewpoint on Aristotle even more confusing.

For point #3:
On this point, I was confused when trying to understand any over arching flow of science, in each general period (beginning, dark age, Renaissance) or overall.

Beginning of Science:
He starts by giving accounts of the pseudoscience (my term) practiced by the major pre-Socratic players and poets up through Plato. The author seems to take the position that Plato's Forms and fundamental belief that reality cannot be perceived by the senses is anti-science in which no foundation can be established. At one point he actually does give credit to Aristotle as bridging the gap between this pseudoscience and the base for the foundation of science. But the reason is hazy, and Aristotle's opposite view to Plato of validation of the senses and the reality we live in, is lost, because he seems to conclude that since the Hellenistic period post Aristotle had more scientific theories that proved to be in better accordance with reality than those of Aristotle's, the Hellenistic period was far more influential than Aristotle. This ignores the fact that it was already stated that Aristotle made the Hellenistic period possible. It's hard to imagine science building up from the principles of Plato. The rest of the book is a good Aristotle thrashing...

Times up to and during the Dark Ages:
In terms of detailing specific scientists' achievements, the author properly focuses on the Arab world while it was still thriving, since science was non-existent in the West. "while al-Rashid and al-Ma'mun were delving into Greek and Persian philosophy, their contemporaries in the West, Charlemagne and his lords, were reportedly dabbling in the art of writing their name". As far as commentating on why science was dead in the West, the author says little of significance. For example, he stays mostly neutral on the role religion played. To me, this is also very disappointing. When science goes from studying space to illiteracy, I expect some significant insight on why it happened, for the sake of science. There is some attempt at the end of Newton's chapter, but there are only a few sentences and no firm stances taken.

Renaissance:
Given that the author was hazy on the beginnings of science, and stays neutral on how science died, it logically follows (thanks Aristotle) that he cannot give any reasons how it was re-born. For every mention of Aristotle's influence in the great scientists' lives of the Renaissance and post Renaissance, there was a statement on how they disagreed with Aristotle as if the author was trying to diminish the influence as much as possible.

Summary:
The fact is that the essentials for a history of science book (from my perspective) were lacking, and the take on Aristotle just poured salt on the wound. Perhaps if you are interested in explanations in mathematics, you could get more from this book.

[Pratik Rath · Rating 5 out of 5]

Beautifully written history of science presented by the ever amazing Weinberg. In a motivational article he once wrote for how physicists should go about research, he emphasized the value of learning the history of science. And who better to communicate it in such a clear manner as him.

This book discusses basic science, which is today often largely discussed at high school level already. But it really took me back to the days when I started falling in love with the subject, and it truly reminded me why I did so. I wish I'd read this book back in the day to give myself a better context of how non-trivial the path to our understanding today was.

This book is a story of the greatest minds in history battling with the hard problem of trying to understand how nature works. The best part is how the author emphasizes the fallacies of each of them, making everyone appear very much human while still appreciating them for their contributions.

Growing up in India, I didn't know nearly as much about the early growth of science and mathematics in Greece and the Middle East. It was also quite interesting to understand what Europe was like in the dark ages when the growth of science stagnated there.

Finally one of the favorite parts of the book for me was the technical notes included at the end which gave very complete explanations of how various results were derived back in the day. In particular, early astronomy is something that is very accessible to young kids and can easily captivate them.

[Rex Fuller · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wanted to read at least one first-rate history of science. Did some research and settled on this one because it is renowned for its quality and ability to communicate the subject to the non-scientifically trained. On that score, it is just right. Immensely informative and sufficiently detailed to tell you what you need to know.

You get the full set of all significant contributions to science beginning with the Greeks of Miletus and Alexandria (yes, as its namesake implies, it was a Greek city at the time), through the Arabs of Baghdad, to the Italians, French, and Germans of the Middle Ages, and finally, the flowering of modern science through what were essentially the achievements of one man: Isaac Newton. It is an interesting and fulfilling story and superbly told. As a catalogue of what we have learned it is near perfect.

However, Weinberg says in his introduction that his focus is different from what is naturally the concern of any history of science: how and what we came to learn about the world. He says his focus is “how we came to learn how to learn about the world.” So, I watched every page like a faithful Doberman for how we came to learn how to learn. I didn’t see it. And I don’t think that resulted from failure to comprehend what was on the pages. My guess as to why: as Weinberg says, he drew the book from his notes of courses on the history of science he taught to non-science students at Texas, and when writing the introduction he remembered what he commented on in the classes, but then stayed true to the notes themselves when actually preparing the material in book form. So, by all means read this because you probably cannot find a better, more readable history of science. Just don’t fall for the tease.

[Jim]

A lot of good information, but it bogged down in too many details & weird names. I kept losing interest. If I knew Greek & Arabic history & names better, I'd probably have enjoyed it more. Well narrated, but I kept zoning out. I took a break a couple of times & returned to it, but finally abandoned it about halfway through.

[Tlaura · Rating 3 out of 5]

Some history of science books suffer from the problem that the authors don't actually know much science (or can't explain it). That's not a problem here. Weinberg gives superb accounts of technical astronomy up to Kepler (with one small exception having to do with the center of motion in Copernicus' system which I won't get into) and an incredibly lucid account of Newtonian mechanics. I confess I had never really understood why the earth should bulge at the equator before reading Weinberg's explanation and now it is clear. Ditto for Weinberg's explanation of Descartes' theory of the rainbow.

Beyond the science itself, Weinberg's problems as a historian are twofold. First, as a self-professed amateur he doesn't know much history. And, second, he doesn't much care about history. This book is uber-Whig history: the pre-history of the Standard Model. Weinberg is mainly interested in how we got to a world in which he could win his Nobel prize. This approach would be fine -- even refreshing -- if Weinberg were a more consistent positivist. By that, I mean if he would focus on the methods and results of scientific investigation instead of constantly digressing into what what metaphysical commitments make a scientist most productive and appealing, which of course are his own. Weinberg seems amazingly blind to his own philosophical commitments, and often ends up falling into the same sort of philosophical determinism he dislikes among historians of science who prize fuzzy grand metaphors over the actual, difficult, insights into nature that make up scientific knowledge.

To get an example of Weinberg's strengths and biases, take his account of the role of observational data in early modern astronomy. Weinberg correctly (in my view) explains that the improvements in predictive accuracy around the turn of the 17th century couldn't disprove Ptolemaic astronomy in the modern sense of proof. The reason is simply that a Ptolemaic model with a solar equant *could* have done nearly as good a job as the Kepler model at explaining the observed motions of the planets in the night sky. This is an excellent point. But then, a few pages later, Weinberg argues that the phases of Venus *did* disprove Ptolemy because only a Ptolemaic model in which Venus and Mercury's deferrents are the orbit of the sun (i.e. a Capellan model) could account for the phases while "this arrangement had never been adopted by Ptolemy or any of his followers". Fine, but the solar equant also had never been adopted by Ptolemy or any of his followers! With good reason: the solar equant remained very controversial in the 17th century precisely because of its obvious Copernican implications until it was definitively established empirically by Cassini and his associates in the early 1660s. Even Huygens had trouble accepting that the earth could be *that much* a planet. Heilbron's The Sun in the Church provides an excellent discussion of this episode.

So why does Weinberg apply these different standards to the Rudolphine Tables and the phases of Venus? My strong suspicion is that it's because Galileo discovered the phases of Venus (at least in the reduced-form account of the period presented here) and Weinberg wants Galileo to get the credit for disproving Ptolemy because Galileo fits his idea of a proper scientist who doesn't "sound like Plato". (Weinberg doesn't like Plato at all. Or Aristotle. Various historical figures are judged on how much they sound like Plato or Aristotle. Galileo gets high points here.)

Related, although it's admittedly a smaller point, Weinberg claims that Kepler accepted solid spheres for the planetary orbs in the Mysterium Cosmographicum and only rejected them because of the ellipses. This is false. Weinberg would likely say it doesn't matter because MC was a bunch of woo and so it might as well have been based on solid spheres. Then don't write about it! At least one reviewer bungled this point too, meaning Weinberg is spreading misinformation. Interpretation is one thing, but historical facts matter in the same way and for the same reasons that scientific facts matter.

Weinberg also doesn't much like Descartes, who got a lot of things "wrong", which Weinberg blames on the lack of empiricism he brought to his physical theory. He quotes a Descartes biographer saying "The seventeenth-century rise of Modern Science, the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, the nineteenth-century Industrial Revolution, your twentieth-century personal computer, and the twentieth-century deciphering of the brain —all Cartesian". Weinberg rightly calls this absurd (though judging from a review, Watson's biography is intentionally absurdist) but it doesn't really reflect a mainstream view in the history of science. Descartes gets a few props for his analytical geometry and his theory of the rainbow, but later Weinberg credits Newton's first law to Gassendi and Huygens, conveniently leaving out the fact that Newton almost certainly took his concept of inertia directly from Descartes, another example of Descartes being "right", and moreover in an extremely influential and fundamental way that reflected the fruits of his rationalist approach.

At the other end of the rationalism/empiricism spectrum, Weinberg brings up Francis Bacon to dismiss his importance, which is fair enough at least as far as physics is concerned. Does Weinberg realize that Koyre got there 70 years before him? Also, when Weinberg later approves of Newton not "feigning hypotheses" (an example of his not "sounding like Plato") he should probably be thankful for Bacon's very large influence on scientific aesthetics in England circa 1690 which likely explained Newton's happily modern-seeming attitude toward hypothesizing more than anything else.

Newton provides the biggest problem for Weinberg's theory of how science must be done. Weinberg doesn't deny Newton's basically teleological and religiously motivated worldview, or his "cavalier" attitude toward reporting the results of experiments accurately. Somehow, though, his problematic metaphysics didn't stop Newton from being a very great scientist (and Weinberg's description of Newtonian mechanics really drives this home). That makes Weinberg's endless (and often horribly arrogant -- the word "stupid" is thrown around a lot) lecturing of previous thinkers for being hidebound by their unscientific commitments ring a little hollow. In a post- Newtonian or even a post-Keplerian world, teleology may make less sense as a philosophical commitment. Put another way, maybe changes in knowledge drive changes in philosophy and not the other way around. Maybe the philosophical commitments of thinkers are actually not very good predictors of their achievements or reflections of their genius. Good modern positivist history of science -- of which there is plenty -- tries to explain what historical processes and institutions made these changes in knowledge possible without getting hung up on who "sounds like Plato" and who doesn't.

In the end, Weinberg tells us that since there are no final causes, and no guarantee that the most successful theories will even be elegant, all we can hope for is to generate better and better theories. These theories provide us with fleeting "joy" because they are pretty and save the phenomena. He justifies this with reference to what Ptolemy, Copernicus and Kepler "must have" felt when they made their discoveries (specifically the ones Weinberg approves of. Is Ptolemy supposed to have felt joy when he reformed astrology in the Tetrabiblos?). Presumably Newton must have felt the most joy of all, which is a bit hard to reconcile with his nervous breakdown in the early 1690s. Fortunately, though, you don't need to dwell on these problematic details but can skip ahead to the excellent and quite long mathematical appendix. There, Weinberg the scientist and excellent popular science writer gets back to what he does best.

[John Devlin · Rating 3 out of 5]

Most historians of science won’t fine anything new here but the author has some well earned insights on the intricacies of the Aristotelian, copernican, tycho,, and keplerian astronomical systems.

Additionally, his points that there’s deep irony in that the stars are where physics flourished and pointed the way towards understanding the terrestrial. He also fairly goes through the many counter theories without casting a modern arrogance that backwards looks these early scientists mistakes.

The discoveries he delineates run parallel to the greater discovery of the scientific method itself…the notion that suppositions about the natural world should conform to nature was initially an afterthought…aesthetics and human concerns were paramount.

From there, that ideas should be tested empirically was initially far afield of human concerns to finally where the natural world could be tested, and in fact, artificially constructed as a basis of human understanding….

[Beauregard Bottomley · Rating 4 out of 5]

The book listens like a series of lectures given to undergraduates (or maybe even graduates) in the liberal arts who want to understand how science developed and how we finally got to Newton. Newton changes everything, and the author will explain why the greatest book ever about the physical world is Newton's Principia ("Principles of Natural Philosophy"). The author outlines the steps that it took for the world to create a Newton. But just like in a college course you have to learn a lot of difficult things (which you'll quickly forget after the class) in order to understand the big picture.

In the process of getting there the author will describe in detail the theories of the early thinkers. To get to that understanding the author steps the listener through the Early Greeks, the Hellenic Period, the great Islamic thinkers (and they were great!), and through Thomas Aquinas, and to the start of Modern Science.

I now know in excruciatingly detail the wrong theories from the history of bad science such as the Ptolemaic system, the Aristotelian theory of motion, and Galileo's erroneous theory of tides. That's sort of a problem with this book. It's hard enough to keep today's less false theories about the world straight than it is to try to learn the fine points about the previously more false theories from the past.

The biggest crack in the armor of superstitious thinking and absolute knowledge comes with Thomas Aquinas. He takes the theology of his time and uses the logical principles of Aristotle to support his faith. At first the Pope forbids that approach but then the next Pope commends the approach. Allowing the logic and the reason that Aristotle represents (but not quite allowing for empiricism), allows the West to create a Newton.

The real theme of the book is along these lines: Plato is silly with his complete reliance on absolute knowledge; Aristotle puts science on the right path by categorizing the real world, but mars it with his final causes; Bacon's empiricism is still not relevant since he is striving for absolute knowledge by divorcing the individual from the world; Descartes's methods of thought leads no where, but his science (and math) are quite impressive; Galileo makes incredible strides but still doesn't realize the universe is not made up of mathematics, math is just a tool for understanding. Newton takes Kepler's empirically derived laws, idealizes them and derives them from first principles and shows how they can explain as well as describe.

Science needs to be understood as studying the particular, contingent and probable, and it never proves anything it just makes statements less false and this book helps one understand how we finally got to this point and out of Plato's Cave.

[Ints · Rating 1 out of 5]

Nedaudz izvērsts lekciju konspekts, kur tikai vietumis var nojaust, ka autors spēj uzrakstīt labāk.

[Ian Divertie · Rating 5 out of 5]

A friend recommended this to me. I admit its given me reason for deep thought, something I so seldom do. Its interesting that ancient revered personages come across as ignorant savages in this book. I don't think my feelings regarding Plato could sink much lower after reading this. I feel the main purpose of this book is more to point out man's prejudice toward false certainty, superstition, and instinct over a searching curiosity. And if you think this might make me an Atheist, far from it, a grounding in a system of ethics is a good thing. The desire to control and structure is not, ---in fact its antithetical to science as well as good moral human behavior. I also tend to agree with the authors view that science is a search, a type of fumbling about, its certainly been my experience conducting "science" over the years. Science as I've been involved with it, is creative, spontaneous, and unpredictable, those who try to make it otherwise don't really understand science. Discovery is wonderful, the journey often confused. Excellent book!

I don't know why, but this book reminded me of an issue I've been rolling around in my head. Following WW II American elites all wanted to become their new heroes. Capitalist, bankers, and managers all wanted to emulate Generals. Generals all wanted to be become bankers and managers. In the 1950's engineers, scientists, and intellectuals were stunned by this development, becoming merely cogs in the machinery or employees. Since this time, engineers have desired to become managers, and intellectuals have morphed into experts. Scientists and those of a yen to be scientists have felt somewhat adrift, although most can find steady employment as the dreaded expert.

[Atila Iamarino · Rating 4 out of 5]

Me diverti aprendendo como foram as deduções que levaram à descoberta de que Mercúrio, Vênus, Marte e Júpiter são planetas e não estrelas, de onde vêm os signos do zodíaco, como a gravidade foi entendida e bem mais. Mas acho que o nome do livro deveria ser To Explain the Universe, já que ele é basicamente voltado para astronomia e o que foi necessário para isso. Pontos bônus por citar e explicar como foi o desenvolvimento científico no Oriente Médio também, algo bem raramente citado.

[Andrey Pletinka · Rating 4 out of 5]

Too much mathematical formulas

[Віталій Роман · Rating 5 out of 5]

Це такий читавий буханець здобного наукового літ-нонфікшн-хлібу. Хрестоматійний виклад курсу загальної фізики. Місцями було складно, місцями дуже цікаво. Але нудно не було жодного разу, тільки розуміння, наскільки змінилась наука. Колись вона була іменована, одноосібна, у стилі війн Тесли і Едісона. Зараз, це рій тисячі наукових "бджіл", які заправляють своїми майже квантовими комп'ютерами, спалюючи грантові гроші задля цілей свого незвіданого, малозрозумілого іншим майбутнього. І пройде час, про них теж хтось напише подібну книгу. Або не напише. Це вже кому як пощастить :)

[Alice · Rating 2 out of 5]

Much more basic than I had imagined it would be and sadly didn't offer up much depth or reflection. It didn't offer up any new insight or really made me think. Interesting enough to finish, but generally just an OK book.

[Maxine · Rating 4 out of 5]

Confession time: I studied history at university and one of the first thing I learned - you can’t judge the past by the present for a whole lot of reasons not least of which is that they didn’t have the same access as us to, well, history. Which brings me to the recent book by Nobel Prize winning theoretical physicist Steven Weinberg, To Explain the World. Weinberg isn’t an historian and feels no need to follow this rule. In fact, he rejects it out of hand which meant at least to me once I got over the shock of his approach some rather unorthodox but still interesting thoughts on the history of science. Take for instance his views on Aristotle versus Plato:

“I confess that I find Aristotle frequently tedious, in a way that Plato is not but although often wrong Aristotle is not silly, in the way that Plato sometimes is.”

He begins his foray into the history of science in classical Greece. He feels the early Greek philosophers were arrogant and smug in their ruminations about science while lacking any proper methodology or, to be precise, any methodology. To make matters worse, they were almost invariably wrong even about things they could have easily verified if they tried doing some real work outside of their heads. He is more impressed with the Hellenistic Greeks who actually developed methods to calculate such things as the size of the earth and were surprisingly accurate in their calculations. After Greece, he looks at other non-western countries only as they influenced western thought and even then pretty much dismisses any contribution by them to science. The one exception to this is the Arab scientists who made some very important scientific advances.

His main concern, however, remains the west and he has some interesting views on many of the thinkers who are often seen as the precursors of modern science. For example, he admires Galileo and Isaac Newton despite some of their more wacky theories but he clearly thinks Descartes gets way too much praise for his contributions to science. He also limits his ruminations to pre-Enlightenment and to physics and astronomy.

One thing I learned way back in those halcyon university days: all history has biases if only in the facts an historian chooses to look at and regardless of whether I agree with his tendency to make judgmental statements about his subjects and their lack of real scientific methods, it certainly made for some interesting reading. Admittedly, I am not a scientist although I find it intriguing but it’s hard to study any history without encountering science eg Newton, not Luther, is considered by many historians as the beginning of Early Modernity. I will also admit I didn’t always understand the science as Weinberg laid it out, especially the astronomy. But, despite his unorthodox approach to history and my lack of knowledge on the subject, it was definitely fascinating and more than a little enlightening to read a history of science written by a scientist.

[Kara Babcock · Rating 3 out of 5]

To Explain the World has been waiting for me on my shelf for a few years. The trouble with these vast, sweeping histories of science is that, as much as I love them, more acute pop science and pop history books always take priority. You want to teach me about vaccines? You want to talk to me about environmental racism? Hell yeah, I’m down. But unless you’re Bill Bryson, your hot take on the last 2000-or-so years of Western science can wait.

But still, I am trying with some small success to get through the remaining physical books I have on my to-read shelf so I can make a big, celebratory purchase of many new books. So I dove into To Explain the World, curious and eager to hear what Weinberg has to say about the “discovery” of science, as he puts it. Weinberg is refreshingly honest about the subjectivity of his opinion, as well as the limitations of his writing. As a result, he furnishes us with an interesting and serviceable history—his writing skills do not always allow him to go exactly where he wants, I think, yet overall this book is a good read.

If I sound cynical about this book and others like it, it’s only because I’ve read so many of them. There's a predictable progression of greatest hits: Thales, Aristarchus, Pythagoras, Archimedes, Aristotle … then the medieval era, then the Renaissance, then the Enlightenment. Weinberg is hardly treading any ground that hasn’t been tread before, and while I appreciate his honesty about this, that doesn’t help me work up a lot of enthusiasm for it.

So what makes To Explain the World potentially stand out from among such a saturated subgenre? A few things, actually!

First, Weinberg’s experience as a physicist rather than a science historian means he definitely has an interesting perspective on this history. At one point, he confesses he has “no idea” how Archimedes accomplished something without calculus, reminding us that we are all incredibly influenced by our upbringing. Weinberg reminds us that when we look back at the accomplishments of the ancients, we should remember that their conception of the world was incredibly different from ours. Even if you don’t remember much science from school, even if you didn’t learn much about the scientific method, chances are you learned a lot more about how the natural world works than most of these Greek philosophers knew in their time. This has nothing to do with intelligence or even with the “progression” of our society—but it does have to do with the differences in how our societies are structured, and the fact that we have developed a systematic approach to society that is far more robust. Weinberg also cautions us that this remains true well into the centuries we might be tempted to think of as closer to “modern” times. Even Isaac Newton, to whom Weinberg devotes an entire chapter and lauds as perhaps the single most significant Western scientist, was interested in alchemy and religion as much as he explored what we now silo off as “proper” scientific pursuits.

Second, Weinberg is not afraid to get into the weeds of the whys and wherefores. To his credit, he hides most of showing his work in a Technical Notes appendix (which I admit, to my eternal mathematician shame, I only skimmed most of them). Even so, the main body of the book contains perhaps a little more math and science than you might be used to in a pop science book coming from a science communicator or historian. This is obviously a super subjective thing, so no shade if it’s not for you. But it is a nice departure from the trend to obscure the technicalities of science behind anecdotes and quips. Every author must calibrate their explanations to find their chosen balance between accuracy and comprehensibility. Weinberg leans towards the accurate, and this at least differentiates To Explain the World from the rest of the crowd.

Then we have Weinberg’s thesis. It is perhaps here that he is at his most ambitious. He cites Kuhn a few times (and even casually drops the fact he met Kuhn once, oooooh). Weinberg, as he hints at when he explains the choice of “discovered” rather than “invented” in the subtitle, believes that it isn’t really accidental that we developed science the way we did. He believes that there is an order to nature that made the development of the scientific method much more likely than not. To be clear, he is not suggesting a supernatural demiurge at work. Indeed, while Weinberg remains carefully diplomatic on the science versus religion divide, he suggests that our willingness to remove the supernatural from the explanatory playing field was a key step in the development of modern science. But really, what he is most proud of as a scientist is the fact that modern science now comprises robust theories that do not belong to any one individual, no matter how many giants’ shoulders that individual belongs to. Modern physics, his own field, is so complex an undertaking these days that we really can’t prop up the fallacious Great Man theory any longer.

I want to conclude with a critique not so much of this book but rather of this subgenre. Weinberg admits in his introduction that this book focuses on Western science, i.e., ancient Greece -> the Arab world -> medieval/Renaissance/Enlightenment Europe. He graciously name-checks China for developing sophisticated science and technology in isolation, for the most part, from the West; he also shouts out to the Indigenous peoples of the Americas. So at least Weinberg isn’t inadvertently presenting science as a uniquely European discovery.

But here’s my critique and my question: why do we keep letting old white dudes write these things (all love to Bill Bryson, but the question stands)? Deep down, I think I avoided this book—and am somewhat exhausted by such books—because it really is, as I noted earlier, a predictable progression of greatest hits. I really should be seeking out books written by Chinese historians about science and technology in China. Or Indigenous authors writing about the Americas, or about Africa, or Australia. I know these books exist, but if we can have yet more books about the history of European science from white guys, publishers can also print more of the alternatives as well. Because at the end of the day, even if my viewpoint of the world is radically different from that of “everything is water” Thales, Weinberg’s point is that we can trace a line from there to here. I am more curious about the cultures and ways of knowing in whose traditions I was not raised, and I would like to see more of those voices represented in our scientific histories and texts.

Like I said, that’s not on Weinberg. He’s doing his best to write what he is qualified to write, and he does a good job at it. To Explain the World is a book I would recommend, if this is what you want: a detailed, methodical survey of the discovery of Western science, predictable if you’ve seen it before yet still enjoyably unique in some ways.

[Nicky · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book is ostensibly about the development of science, and particularly the scientific method: the development, in short, of the understanding that we need both theory and experiment to derive natural laws. It goes into a lot of the history of the development of astronomy and physics, and thus necessarily chemistry to some degree as well (since the makeup of an atom affects chemistry)… but neglects biology almost entirely. Since biology is my interest, I’d hoped for a bit more of it, but instead it was more or less included as an afterthought.

Weinberg’s tone is entertaining enough, and he certainly isn’t constrained by anyone else’s ideas of who truly contributed to science — he dismisses most of the ideas of Plato and Aristotle, even within the context of their time, because they didn’t conceive of the scientific method or how to come up with testable theories and follow through. You may or may not find that justified; I was glad, personally, that we didn’t spend too much time on Plato, as I’m not an enormous fan.

There’s a lot of science in here as well, in that Weinberg explains how discoveries were made and proven, or why they weren’t actually consistent with the world and what you can observe. Most of this is very clear, but anything that involves maths is sadly lost on me, and I confess to skipping the back section. There’s a reason my BSc in Natural Sciences is almost all biology — I have neither the head for, nor the interest in, mathematical rules and proofs.

It’s entertaining enough, but it’s narrower than the blurb might lead you to think — the vast majority of it actually deals with astronomy and maths.

Originally posted here.

[William · Rating 2 out of 5]

I shouldn't write a review of this book because, honestly, I gave it only perfunctory attention as I read. I was disappointed with the content and could not imagine I was reading anything new or useful. I did not get a sense of the wonder and excitement he generated in his earlier books especially Dreams of Final Theory. To Explain the World seems to be nothing more than an author selected incomplete history of only some subjects, most noticeably math and astronomy and his dislike or appreciation of some of the thinking done by both famous and obscure scientist and philosophers. He had a particular distain for Descartes. He spent unnecessary time pointing out how many of the early practitioners of science were simply wrong. No kidding. Weinberg did very little in this volume to explain the world.

[Alex Lee · Rating 1 out of 5]

Weinberg wants to recover the moment when philosophy turned into the scientific method. He locates this moment sometime between Galileo and Newton which isn't surprising, as that is where the role of experimentation is traditionally thought to play a part in the synthesis.

He contrasts this with the "pure reason" method of Descartes and Plato. This "discovery" as espoused by Weinberg is in contrast to philosophers of science like Paul Feyerabend and Irme Lakatos who demonstrate in detail that even with Newton the modality of pure reason plays a role. In fact, Weinberg, even though he identifies with Newton, states that while Newton uses mathematics to uncover physical truth, Newton eschewed physical observation. In fact, Newton utilizes Descartes method of analysis and synthesis aligning gravity as being a kind of "first principle" in direct contradiction with Weinberg's thesis. As Lakatos shows through a series of essays, it wasn't until the late 18th century with the timing of J.S. Mill's thoughts on the role of rationality and induction in his A System of Logic that the role of experimentation beings to be considered as a necessary part in the synthesis of theory. Newton wasn't recognized as being correct for well over 100 years after he died, as the debate between Cartesianists and Newtonians eventually comes a head when enough data was collected to verify Newtonian usability.

Weinberg, while seeking to find the moment when scientific method comes to being, does not really examine texts of that time to find the moment when contemporaries recognize the method. Instead he relies on his own intuition of when he "identifies" with the theories themselves. He relies on his authority as a physicist as the metric of when the method comes to be. If you accept that he knows what the scientific method looks like, then you must accept his assessment of when this happens. He sticks with his own understanding as the assessment of who is correct or not. He does acknowledge the limits of his predecessor's assumptions but he is unable (or perhaps unwilling) to dive into a full rational assessment of their theories, attacking them at the level of their usable results rather than at the level of their methodology. In that sense, Weinberg is less about finding a method in its immanent formation and more about finding the moment at which people begun to matching what we consider to be Truth as the (scientific) method generated procedure... the unspoken assumption being that if they match Truth then they must be closer to what is the proper procedure. Purely retroactive mumbo-jumbo.

Thus, if you dived into the contemporary writings and considerations of Newton and Galileo as Lakatos and Feyerabend did, Weinberg might have to contend that the scientific method did not exist as a mode of discovery for even Newton pursued truth in a completely different way than how scientists today might do.

If you assume that the scientific method is impeachable, it becomes particularly strange that Weinberg would write this book. He obviously spent some time considering in detail the theories and ideas of past thinkers. Yet he shies away from actually critiquing their method. For instance, while this books appears to be about method there is no discussion of what the steps of the scientific method are, nor is there any discussion of how this differs from the analysis-synthesis method except to claim that experimentation plays a role in the calibration.

So on that end, Weinberg never really clarifies what he is talking about. He assumes a position of authority but never presents the entire context of his claim so that we can decide for ourselves. For that reason this book appears ideological in what it leaves out although it may have just been written for his own personal edification than any real education of the public. Weinberg's failure to clarify the basic subject matter of the book (and instead diving in directly to the material of analysis) shows that this book is more about justifying the veracity of his claims without really showing us what his claim actually is. In that sense, he fails to really write the book he sets out to do, needing in a big part to really do his homework as the scientific method was reified by many more characters than just Galileo and Newton (who themselves did not truly practice the method). To that end, a careful reading of this book would show us that the most Weinberg can say is that Galileo and Newton "feel" familiar to him. He relies on the "accident" of their theory being true as proof of their adherence to the method more than anything else -- when a closer analysis would show that they did not recognize the method as claimed by Weinberg being as such. After all, in the totality of Newton's writings he wrote extensively about alchemy and God in an attempt to justify his claims in math and physics, showing that Newton himself is not the scientist that Weinberg seeks to paint him as.

Whether this is just willful ignorance on the part of Weinberg or if it is a lack of understanding (perhaps two sides of the same coin), but as stated before if taken a book meant to educate the public, this book is heavy on the ideology by virtue of what it leaves out. The development of the scientific method required far more characters and was quite lengthy in its struggle to define intuition's role in theorization, much more so than simply "finding" truth in the world. At one point Weinberg recognizes the need for the principle of judgement when he criticizes the church's role in persecuting Galileo. Even if Galileo was wrong, Weinberg states, the church shouldn't have persecuted him for trying to find out more about nature. In the same way, the method should be judged on the level of its process as a modality of calibrating understanding -- whether or not its claims are true at a given point is not the point at all as such claims could be accidentally true (the Gauss's law coming to be recognized is an example).

So while Weinberg does well in writing clearly, he certainly has an agenda beyond the method, which he doesn't really seem to discuss sufficiently, preferring to judge their writings on whether they fit his understanding of what is true or not. In that sense, Weinberg may be a good physicist but he is a poor philosopher, mixing the justification for the theory with the method for generating the theory... the scientific method isn't a retroactive judgement of truth, it is a specific process for determining causal connections, requiring the work of mathematicians, logicians and philosophers, both "natural" and "philosophical", an accomplishment Weinberg skims over by claiming the Galileo and Newton did it all.

[Davide Nole · Rating 4 out of 5]

Actual rating 4.5/5

Review in English on my YT channel https://youtu.be/BETXD2q4g7g

Recensione in italiano sul mio canale YT https://youtu.be/KZZFUdYPDEo

[kathleen]

good riddance.