Overview

What is good science? What goal - if any - is the proper end of scientific activity? Is there a legitimizing authority that scientists may claim? These questions have long been debated but, as Gerald Holton points out, every era must offer its own responses. This book sets out to examine these questions, not in the abstract, but showing their historic roots and the answers emerging from the scientific and political controversies of the past century. Employing the case-study method and the concept of scientific themata that he has proposed, Holton displays the broad scope of his insight into the workings of science: from the influence of Ernst Mach on 20th-century physicists, biologists, psychologists, and other thinkers, to the rhetorical strategies used in the work of Albert Einstein, Niels Bohr and others; from the bickering between Thomas Jefferson and the US Congress over the proper form of federal sponsorship of scientific research, to philosophical debates since Oswald Spengler over whether our scientific knowledge will ever be complete. In his final chapter, Holton scrutinizes the ""anti-science phenomenon"". This he defines as the world views and political ambitions of the proponents of science as it is practised today; and on the other hand, those of the critics of ""establishment science"" (animal rights activists, environmentalists, feminists and social-constructionists, and those worried that science might overwhelm the individual in the postmodern world) and the adherents of ""alternative science"" (creationists, New Age healers and astrologers). Science and Anti-Science will be of great interest not only to scientists and scholars in the field of science studies but also to educators, policymakers, and all those who wish to gain a fuller understanding, of challenges to and doubts about the role of science in our lives today.

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