Steven Shapin is an emeritus professor in the history of science at Harvard. His books include The Scientific Life, A Social History of Truth and Never Pure.
What are the people in our lives really like – inside? Seeming and being may not be the same. Smiles may be false and vows of love insincere. Appearances are deceptive; you can’t tell a book by its cover; beauty is only skin deep. Yet, in ordinary circumstances, surfaces are all we have to go on. We do often infer something about books from their covers.
Physiognomy was the name...
Roger Penrose liked puzzles. In the 1950s, inspired by a catalogue of prints made by the paradoxical Dutch artist M.C. Escher, the young Penrose and his psychiatrist-geneticist father, Lionel, set out to produce drawings of ‘impossible objects’. Pictorial conventions cue us to perceive two-dimensional drawings as representations of three-dimensional things, but these conventions...
Among all the things that people take into their bodies, water is special, its necessity matched by its neutrality. There’s no doubt about the necessity. Human bodies are mostly water: about 60 per cent in adult men; a little less in adult women. Without water, death comes within days. A sedentary man of roughly normal weight, living in a temperate climate, requires about three litres...
The tragedy of Thomas Kuhn’s life was to have written a great book. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions was published in 1962, when he was forty, and he spent the rest of his life distressed by its success. It has sold 1.7 million copies, and has been translated into 42 languages. Very few academic books sell in those numbers and scarcely any are still seen as state of the art...
The ‘white bear problem’ in experimental psychology has to do with the unintended consequences of trying to suppress certain thoughts. I tell you not to think of white bears, and – see – you’ve just imaged up a white bear. It’s a bit like when the government tells you not to panic. On 15 September, the US Food and Drug Administration issued a warning against a recipe for NyQuil Chicken.
What is it about the body that resists plain description? When we discuss our bodies, we evoke other things: the body as machine, possibly malfunctioning; the body as computer, infinitely programmable....
The practices of science, it appears, are increasingly industrial in location, corporate in organisation, and product and profit-minded in motivation. In the eyes of various commentators, these...
For the great majority of people, believing in the truths of science is unavoidably an act of faith. Most of us neither witness the successful experiments nor would be able to understand them if...
Most of what we know and think is secondhand. ‘Almost all the opinions we have are taken by authority and upon credit,’ wrote Montaigne, in an age when the sum of human knowledge was...
‘Scientists’ in our culture are (in many disciplines) people who perform ‘experiments’ in ‘laboratories’ and ‘testify’ about them to a wider...
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