How We Know:  An Exploration of the Scientific Process

How We Know: An Exploration of the Scientific Process
by Martin Goldstein and Inge F. Goldstein

(Illus.)
DaCapo Press
1981
376pp.
0-306-80140X
Bibliographies; Index

Contents

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[This book] concentrates on physics, medicine, and psychology, utilizing a non-scholarly "two cultures" approach: it focuses on humanistic as well as formal aspects of scientific method. Alternately cogent, funny, and belabored chapters discuss fact, hypothesis, measurement, experiment, logic, mathematics, and probability and statistics. Best are those sections treating John Snow sleuthing cholera, dastardly Count Rumford and the caloric theory of heat, British/American disparities in diagnosing madness, and the African "poison oracle." The book suffers from some imbalances in sophistication, and from sloppy editing: egregious typos...inconsistency of mathematical expression, figure misdescription, et al. References are annotated well and offer reliable and intriguing suggestions for further reading.

--Reviewed by Wendy Levins in Library Journal, 103 (June 1 1978), p.1184. (From Book Review Digest 1980).