The Knowledge Machine: How Irrationality Created Modern Science

by Michael Strevens

Among them you might encounter “philosopher-scientists,” such as Albert Einstein and the eighteenth-century physicist, mathematician, and social thinker Émilie du Châtelet (who translated Newton’s Principia into French), or thinkers as familiar with history and literature as they are with the technical apparatus of their craft, such as Stephen Jay Gould and Murray Gell-Mann. They may write books about beauty in nature that celebrate the ideas of Pythagoras and Plato, like the theoretical physicist Frank Wilczek. They may champion the aesthetic and moral importance of natural diversity, like Rachel Carson and E. O. Wilson. They may explore the implications of human cognition for life and history, like the psychologists Alison Gopnik and Steven Pinker. These thinkers are, precisely because of their expansive interests, far more likely to be known to most readers than the great, silent, scientific majority upon whose minds scientific training has fixed ponderous iron clamps.