It is only four years since we were treated to Abraham Pais’s authoritative study of Einstein, Subtle is the Lord, and now he presents an equally large and quite as impressive history of...
If a speaker at one of his seminars began to explain how he had come by his ideas, the great Russian theoretical physicist L.D. Landau would stop him with disdain: ‘That is only an item for...
Most professional philosophers think of themselves primarily as scholars, as hunters and gatherers in the field of understanding with no particular commitment to serve society in any other role....
Late Medieval philosophers, knowing from their study of Classical cosmography that the earth is a globe, often speculated about what lay at its poles. Most believed them uninhabitable, ‘the...
A title which deliberately echoes that of Darwin’s joint presentation with Wallace to the Linnaean Society in 1858 may appear not only presumptuous but also inappropriate to a commemoration...
Along the beautiful coastline of California live the northern elephant seals (Mirounga angustirostris). When the females are ready, they emerge from the waters of the Pacific to nurse their...
These two books are completely different in form and content, but one common thread is the concern of both writers to combine a logical discourse with a social critique. Dorothy Stein brings...
While writing World of Secrets, Walter Laqueur had discussions with the present and all surviving past directors of the Central Intelligence Agency save one, as well as with other senior...
In January 1936 when George V was dying, Lord Dawson, his physician, wrote on the back of a menu card: ‘The King’s life is moving peacefully towards its close.’ This message was...
Traditional histories of psychiatry, and those which preface the standard medical textbooks on the subject, are good examples of Whiggish historical writing. The dark ages for madness last until...
Sir Edmund Whittaker’s History of the Theories of Aether and Electricity first appeared in 1910, and is mentioned at the very start of the book under review, though never again. The scope...
This book contains a collection of essays about biology, most of which have been published before, in varied and often inacessible places, together with a new concluding chapter on dialectics....
It could be said that Oliver Sacks put neuropathology on the literary map. His first book Awakenings, about the stunning effects of the drug L-Dopa on patients afflicted with a form of...
Institutional guilt seems to last at least as long as institutional pride. A generation after the United States and the United Kingdom tested their first nuclear and thermonuclear bombs, long...
Once in an unguarded moment when I was trying to illustrate the unbounded nature of human vanity, I shamefacedly admitted to my daughter that I, too, outwardly so cool-headed and realistic about...
A computer is a tool, working the intentions of its designer or user. It is no more malevolent than the village clock whose chimes wake us in the night, or the car whose failed brakes run us...
Alfred North Whitehead, who lived from 1861 to 1947, is chiefly remembered in England as Bertrand Russell’s collaborator in the three volumes of Principia Mathematica. He was, however, not...
Medawar presents an erudite and entertaining account of the limits of science, or mostly the lack of them, as perceived by great thinkers from Francis Bacon to Karl Popper and himself. His...