100 Books Like The Road Since Structure

Shapin makes the audacious claim that there never really was a scientific revolution in Early Modern Europe, despite the fact that “the scientific revolution” has been a central organizing idea in the history of science and the history of Western culture more generally.

His provocative book provides a useful and engaging assessment of the utility of the concept of “the scientific revolution” for making sense of developments in the history of science.  He challenges us to think about the place of radical changes in the history of science, and whether the claims scientists make about such changes are merely rhetorical constructions.

Despite Shapin’s arguments, I am inclined to think something very significant happened in the sciences in the 16th and 17th Centuries, something that deserves to be called “revolutionary”. But Shapin’s book will certainly make readers reflect on what they mean by scientific revolution.

Psillos defends a view called scientific realism.

Scientific realists generally assume that the growth of scientific knowledge is continuous and cumulative, with no significant setbacks. Discoveries in science generally add on to our current understanding of the world. Scientific realists generally regard scientific revolutions or paradigm changes as a threat to the rationality of science as such changes seem to imply that scientists have had a fundamentally flawed understanding of the world.

Psillos presents one of the most comprehensive and strongest cases for realism. Anyone who is serious about defending a view of the development of science that involves periodic revolutionary changes of theory, as I do, has to take Psillos’ arguments very seriously.

Zuckerman provides a comprehensive study of the American scientists who won Nobel prizes between 1907 and 1972.

The book provides a window into the personalities of the people doing Nobel prize-winning research, as well as the sort of environments in which they were socialized and educated. Nobel laureates have tended to study and work with other Laureates or future Laureates. She also discusses the impact that winning a Nobel prize has on scientists, and the effects of the prize are not wholly positive.

The book also demonstrates the potential power of sociological analyses. Zuckerman creatively combines interview data with quantitative analyses. I think Zuckerman’s books are a fantastic example of how to conduct empirical research in sociology and the social sciences more generally.

Gingerich discusses both the reception of Copernicus’ heliocentric theory, as well as his own extensive research on Copernicus’ book, De Revolutionibus.

Over the course of several decades, Gingerich studied hundreds of copies of the first and second editions of Copernicus’ famous book in an effort to constructive a comprehensive census of the existing copies. These books can now sell for millions of dollars.

Gingerich was motivated in part by earlier studies of the annotations in various copies of the first edition of De Revolutionibus. Some of these contain many detailed annotations, indicating that the book was often studied with great care, contrary to a popular view that the book was seldom read. Further, he was able to reconstruct social networks by noting which copies contained the exact same annotations as other copies.

Gingerich makes the reader feel the excitement of archival research, as his book reads like a… show more.

In this classic book, Kuhn introduces the idea of a "paradigm" and shows that real progress comes through paradigm shifts.

That hit me like a rock when I first read it. I love how in the second edition, Kuhn talks about the difficulties of deep change: "the problem is that the new paradigm is always worse than the old one." 

The new paradigm may be better in some way, but it is also sketchy, unformed, and it creates lots of new uncertainties. So, for somebody to shift to a new paradigm always requires a leap of faith!

Collins is a brilliant and lucid exponent of the (mainly British) “strong programme” in the sociology of science. He is one of the numerous “children of Kuhn,” in the sense that like Kuhn he understands scientists to be (usually) honest and serious human beings, not machines implementing an alleged Scientific Method.

The late French philosopher Bruno Latour was infamous for his iconoclastic work in the history and sociology of science and technology.

If you read only one of his books, I’d say go for We Have Never Been Modern because it cuts to the heart of things by disrupting the conventional understanding of modernity as a clear separation between nature and culture. Latour argues that even as “moderns” have been rhetorically invested in this particular bifurcation of the world, nature-culture hybrids are continually proliferating.

So if you’ve ever asked yourself, why are cities not considered natural landscapes? Or why are animals always presumed to be without culture? Or what does it even mean to be modern? Then this is the book for you.

I spend a lot of my time trying to clarify the bilge poured out by the merchants of fake science: the flat-earthers, creationists, and climate deniers mainly, but also medical quacks and other fruitloops who throw out alternative science, stuff which is like normal science, with one small exception. I was already fighting these fights when Wolpert came to Sydney, and I chaired a lecture he gave. He showed us where the problem lay in combatting idiocy: the idiots depend on naïve and naked intuition.

Invariably, these unhinged pseudo-realities rely on a simple misreading of scientific lore, and Lewis explained that this is because a great deal of science is counter-intuitive. We can’t see evolution happening, the world looks flat, the sun appears to go around us, and common sense says that kinetic energy must be proportional to velocity, not it's square. Enter the simpleton who slept through a key… show more.

There are many short, accessible introductions to what current philosophers of science spend their time arguing about; this is one of the best. It wisely doesn’t cover everything, but instead uses Francis Bacon’s crucial break with the authority of Aristotle as a point of entry into current debates on half a dozen core issues such as inductive inference, progress, and realism.

Polanyi, an eminent Hungarian Jewish chemist who spent his career at the University of Manchester, was the smarter brother of the more famous Karl Polanyi, the socialist economic historian. Michael (Mihály) shows in the book how science depends on ordinary, “personal” knowledge, as for example in riding a bicycle. He was a “liberal” in the European sense, unlike his brother, and saw the scientific community as analogous to a free market, and the free market as analogous to a scientific community.