Borderlands of science

Where Sense Meets Nonsense

Michael Shermer

358 pages, parution le 02/08/2001

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Résumé

Michael Shermer takes us to the place where real science (such as the big bang theory), borderland science (superstring theory), and just plain nonsense (Big Foot) collide with one another. An excursion through the borderlands of science, history, and historical biography, enlivened by the many interesting stories and insights involving many of history's most famous scientists.

Contents

Introduction: Blurry Lines and Fuzzy Sets: The Boundary
Detection Problem in the Borderlands of Science......................1

Part I: Borderlands Theories

1. The Knowledge Filter: Reality Must Take Precedence in the Search for Truth............................................37
2. Theories of Everything: Nonsense in the Name of Science......50
3. Only God Can Do That?: Cloning Tests the Moral Borderlands of Science..........................................66
4. Blood, Sweat, and Fears: Racial Differences and What They Really Mean................................................80
5. The Paradox of the Paradigm: Punctuated Equilibrium and the Nature of Revolutionary Science.........................97

Part II: Borderlands People

6. The Day the Earth Moved: Copernicus's Heresy and Sulloway's Theory..............................................129
7. Heretic-Personality: Alfred Russel Wallace and the Nature of Borderlands Science..................................159
8. A Scientist Among the Spiritualists: Crossing the Boundary from Science to Pseudoscience.........................179
9. Pedestals and Statues: Freud, Darwin, and the Hero-Myth in Science...........................................199
10. The Exquisite Balance: Carl Sagan and the Difference Between Orthodoxy and Heresy in Science........................215

Part III: Borderlands History

11. The Beautiful People Myth: Why the Grass is Always Greener in the OtherCentury...................................241
12. The Amadeus Myth: Mozart and the Myth of the Miracle of Genius......................................................262
13. A Gentlemanly Arrangement: Science at its Best in the Great Evolution Priority Dispute...............................283
14. The Great Bone Hoax: Piltdown and the Self-Correcting
Nature of Science..............................................307
Notes..............................................................321
Bibliography.......................................................339
About the Author...................................................353
Index..............................................................355

Caractéristiques techniques

	PAPIER
Éditeur(s)	Oxford University Press
Auteur(s)	Michael Shermer
Parution	02/08/2001
Nb. de pages	358
Format	16 x 24
Couverture	Relié
Poids	700g
Intérieur	Noir et Blanc
EAN13	9780195143263