From Certainty to Uncertainty: The Story of Science and Ideas in the Twentieth Century
Books / Hardcover
Books › Science › Physics › General
ISBN: 0309076412 / Publisher: joseph Henry Press, April 2002
A popular science writer and physicist who created the Pari Center for New Learning in Italy traces the substitution in science and other fields of a new world view tolerating uncertainty for that of a deterministic universe. Includes a post-9/11 postscript, and appendix on G÷del's meta-mathematical theorem. Includes a few footnoted references. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)
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Early Theorists believed that science promised certainty. Built on a foundation of fact and constructed with objective and trustworthy tools, science consistently produced knowledge. Then disturbing discoveries made by twentieth-century scientists revealed that this knowledge will always be fundamentally incomplete and that a true understanding of the world is ultimately beyond our grasp.In this book, physicist F. David Peat examines the basic philosophic certainty that characterized the thinking of humankind through the nineteenth century and contrasts it with the startling fall of certainty in the twentieth. Indeed, the nineteenth century was marked by a boundless optimism and confidence in the power of progress and technology. Our ebullience was so great, our belief in science so firm, that in 1900 the President of Britain's Royal Society proclaimed that everything of importance had already been discovered by science.But it was not long before the seeds of a scientific revolution began to take root.
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