I have just finished reading my Christmas book and thought I'd pass it along
as a recommendation to the list. The book is titled "Uncommon Sense: The
Heretical Nature of Science" by Alan Cromer a physicist out of Northeastern
University and is published through Oxford U. Press.
The book is a bit hard to classify, but I'll give it a brief try. It is a
history of science writ large; i.e. on the large scale wrt to time, more of
history of how science developed to be rather than a history of scientists
and discoveries and theories. Starting with the evolution of hominids in
ch. 3. The prior chapters being the attempt at explaning what is science
and how did it develope.
Its a short read but fascinating in my opinion.
I'll leave with his operative one sentence definition of what science is;
due to John Ziman.
Science is the search for the widest possible consensus among competent
researchers.
I think this captures succinctly the scientific method better than much of
what we rail against here on phys-L or have sometimes proposed. The opening
paragraph in a later chapter states:
"Science is a social activity that studies those things for which a
universal consensus is possible. Its methods are experimentation and
mathematics because it is possible to obtain general agreement using them.
They are, to use Ziman's term consensible. This isn't because these methods
are unambiguous -- the case of cold fusion shows just how ambiguous
experiments can be -- but because their ambiguities are capable of
resolution.