TO EXPLAIN THE WORLD: The Discovery of Modern Science.
By Steven Weinberg. Allen Lane. $39.99.
"As is natural for an academic, when I want to learn about something, I volunteer to teach a course in the subject," writes Nobel-prizewinning physicist Steven Weinberg. What he wanted to learn about was the history of science, the story of how our knowledge of the natural world developed from the earliest attempts to explain why inanimate objects behave in the way that they are observed to behave.
He admits that this book is based on lecture notes that he prepared for those undergraduate courses and it bears the marks of that genesis. Indeed, it would be easier to see it as prescribed reading for Physics 101 rather than as a popular, if inevitably selective, account of how people understood the world at various times in the past.
The book treats of physics and astronomy as they were understood by the Greeks, the Hellenists, the Arabs and the medieval, mainly clerical thinkers. The ancients were particularly keen to understand the rules that govern motion in the heavens. They invented epicycles and eccentrics and equants in an effort to explain their observations; some had Earth and the Sun moving around a central point; there was dispute between Ptolemaic and Aristotelian explanations; even the Arabs were involved, adding algebra, algorithm and alcohol to the mix.
Copernicus was on his deathbed before he allowed his heliocentric theory to be published, but it took Kepler to put manners on the heavens with his three great laws of planetary motion. Then followed Galileo, the telescope, and finally the magisterial work of Newton. The treatment finishes there. Maxwell, Faraday, Rutherford, Bohr, Einstein and Schrodinger are mentioned only in a brief epilogue.
A careful interpretation of the book's title and subtitle justifies ending the book with Newton, but a reader expects some treatment of recent research from a living Nobel winner.
The writing lacks the excitement which writers like C P Snow, Jacob Bronowski, Richard Feynman and Carl Sagan brought to the story of scientific progress. While the book is comprehensive and undoubtedly accurate, the result is far from thrilling. It is, in fact, the kind of thing a professor might prescribe for undergraduate physics students to wean them off their preferred world of algebra, algorithm and alcohol.
Frank O'Shea is a Canberra reviewer.
