Fun With Science
Catherine Crouch
January 1, 1999
Unless you're a scientist, you probably only took a few science courses in college—if you didn't manage to avoid them altogether. Still, our lives are more and more dependent on science and technology, and science is often viewed as the only "real" knowledge out there (though there are hard-core relativists who contest even that!). Not surprisingly, one result is a glut of books explaining science for the non-scientist.
The best of these books seek both to explain science (or technology) and to set it in its historical and philosophical context. Two such books are by David Park, professor of physics emeritus at Williams College. Park nearly single-handedly convinced me to go to sleepy Williamstown for college, just to be around someone who loved science as much as he did. He weaves together deft explanation of scientific ideas with exposition of the historical, literary, and philosophical thinking surrounding the development of the science. The How and the Why: An Essay on the Development and the Origins of Scientific Theory (Princeton, 1988) is intended to introduce readers to the historical development of "the effort to understand the physical world." Park begins with ancient Greek science, which is difficult for the modern reader to distinguish from philosophy, and works his way forward in time to relativity and quantum mechanics. No less than 13 appendices elaborate on scientific concepts too intricate to be fully explained in the course of the book's narrative.
The Fire Within the Eye: A Historical Essay on the Nature and Meaning of Light (Princeton, 1997) tackles the nature of light and the mechanism of vision. Park discusses not only the physical nature of light but also the roles that light plays in art, literature, ...
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