WORKSHOP AND THE WORLD

Science has acquired great authority and that authority has benefitted it all. This historical account of the relationship between public and the expert sheds important light on our current predicament. It shows what went right and wrong in modernity and how scientific discoveries and theories were received, showing that there is nothing obvious or inevitable about the social reception of science. Crease pulls this all off with the thinking of a philosopher, the precision of a scientist and the storytelling of a great biographer. He asks when does a scientific discovery become an accepted fact, and why have scientific facts become easy to deny? Crease answers these questions by describing the origins of our scientific infrastructure - the 'workshop' and the role of ten of the world's greatest thinkers in the shaping it. The provocative leaders and thinkers Kemal Atatürk and Hannah Arendt addressed the relationship between the scientific community and the public in times of deep distrust. Other chapters cover Francis Bacon's New Atlantis, Galileo Galilei and the Authority of Science, René Descartes Workshop Thinking, Gianbattista Vico Going Mad Rationally, Mary Shelley's Hideous Idea, Auguste Comte's Religion of Humanity, Max Weber's Authority and Bureaucracy and Edmund Husserl's Cultural Crisis. Small illus., 319pp.