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...
The phenomenon of simultaneous discovery is an old chestnut, roasted in turn by historians, sociologists and philosophers of science. No matter how frequently the phenomenon occurs, wrote Pierre...
In a world where dockers vote Tory and Cambridge graduates become KGB colonels, predicting class behaviour is a chancy business. Let me conjure up a still more incongruous example. Conceive a...
‘It’s not that Ronald Reagan hasn’t got any ideas of his own,’ an American who held high office in the Pentagon under Jimmy Carter remarked recently. ‘The trouble is...
God began to leave the world in 1543. That was the year when modern science is deemed to have begun; when the appearance of Copernicus’s De Revolutionibus and Vesalius’s Anatomy...
Before my appointment to a visiting scholarship at the Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace was confirmed I had to submit a synopsis of my proposed research. At that time my working...
Not the least of the debts we owe to the late Michel Foucault is that he directed our attention to the revolutions which transformed the life sciences around the dawn of the 19th century. On the...
The pharmaceutical industry arouses conflicting emotions. Anti-vivisectionists, fringe medical practitioners and food faddists all tend to hate it, while the rest of us are periodically alarmed...
Jonathan Gathorne-Hardy describes the practice of a woman doctor working alone in an inner-city wasteland: The receptionist was replacing a lavatory seat when we arrived. The other had been torn...
Eureka! Scientific discoveries, as everyone knows, are made by those flashes of insight in which the mind of a scientist perceives some previously hidden truth about nature. The deeper truth,...
‘Science policy’ is not quite a contradiction in terms but it contains within itself a dialectical opposition between careful planning and the exploitation of opportunity. One might...