Roger G. Newton Knihy

It's not a scientific truth that has come into question lately but the truth - the very notion of scientific truth. Bringing a reasonable voice to the culture wars that have sprung up around this notion, this book offers a clear and constructive response to those who contend, in parodies, polemics, and op-ed pieces, that there really is no such thing as verifiable objective truth - without which there could be no such thing as scientific authority. Roger Newton gives us a guided tour of the intellectual structure of physical science. From there he conducts us through the understanding of reality engendered by modern physics, the most theoretically advanced of the sciences. With its first-hand look at models, facts, and theories, intuition and imagination, the use of analogies and metaphors, the importance of mathematics (and now, computers), and the "virtual" reality of the physics of micro-particles, The Truth of Science is a practicing scientist's account of the foundations, processes, and value of science.

For many of us, the physical sciences are as obscure as the phenomena they explain. We see the wonders of nature but miss the symmetry beneath, framed as it is in ever stranger symbols and concepts. Roger Newton's accessible account of how physicists understand the world allows the expert and novice alike to explore both the mysteries of the universe and the beauty of the science that gives shape to the unseeable.In What Makes Nature Tick? we find engaging discussions of solitons and superconductors, quarks and strings, phase space, tachyons, time, chaos, and indeterminacy, as well as the investigations that have led to their elucidation. But Roger Newton does not limit this volume to late-breaking discoveries and startling facts. He presents physics as an expanding intellectual structure, a network of very human ideas that stretches back three hundred years from our present frontier of knowledge. Where does our unidirectional sense of time come from? What makes a particle elementary? How can forces be transmitted through empty space? In addition to providing these answers, and a host of others at the very heart of physics, Newton shows us how physicists formulate the questions--a process in which intuition, imagination, and aesthetics have a powerful influence.