Science and Sensibility
James R Newman

Science and Sensibility       ISBN 0671636103

Purchased: 2005
I've greatly enjoyed my time reading this, with tons of bookdarts spent on it.

Amazon: Science and Sensibility

Overall Impression

This two-volume set is great reading, with a lot of breadth and a little bit of depth. I'm still finishing up the second volume, slowly, trying to enjoy it as I go along.

Quotes

"Enormous effort was expended on the science of grammar--on the the parts of speech, on gender, on mood, tense, the conjugation of verbse, and similar delights" -- vI p29

"All great scientists are poets; many are mystics." -- vI p65

Voltaire was the foremost figure who seized upon the Lisbon earthquake as an opportunity to attack the climate of optimism. The chief target of his attack was what he called the tout est bien philosophy expressed twenty years earlier in Alexander Pope's "Essay on Man." In the preface to the Poèm sur le déastre de Lisbonn, Voltaire made some devastating points. If, he asked, when Lisbon was destroyed, the philosophers had said to the wretched survivors, "Whatever happens is for the best; the heirs of the dead will benefit financially; the building trade will enjoy a boom; animals will grow fat on meals provided by the corpses trapped in the debris; an earthquake is a necessary effect of a neccessary cause; private misfortune must not be overrated; an individualwho is unlucky is contributing to the general good"--would not such a speech be as cruel as the earthequake was destructive? We must admit, said Voltaire, that there is injustice and evil in the world, that there is inexcusable suffering, that there rae inexplicable calamities. It is stupid and self-deluding to pretend that every misfortune is a benefit in disguise. It is folly o believe that Providence will assure safe-conduct to the virtuous. Man is "weak and helpless, ignorant of his destiny, and exposed to terrible dangers, as all must now see." Optimisim must be replaced by realism; at best, but an "apprehensive hope that Providence will lead us through our dangerous world to a happier state." -- vI p82

"There is no evidence, of course, that a single scientific discovery eer was made by induction as conceived by Bacon. On the contrary it is quite clear that to engage in research without the stimulus and guidance of hypotheses, rules, preconceptions, anticipations, control criteria and the like is a hopeless if not indeed frivolous activity. Abundeant spport for this conclusion may be found throughout the literature of science, and proof of the futility of "pure induction" is not lacking in Bacon's own records of research." -- vI p91

Tartaglia did not take Cardan's betrayal lightly. The feud was long and acrid, marked by many challeneges, appeals to the public conscience, and mutual denunciations. Mathematics was a serious business in those days. -- vI p104

Illustrious men are required to say deathless things on their deathbeds. Laplace is said to have departed after expressing the reasonable opinion, "What we know is very slight; what we don't know is immense." De Morgan, observing that "this looks like a parody on Newton's pebbles," claims on close authority to have learned Laplace's very last words: "Man follows only phantoms." -- vI p138

Whatever Clifford tackled was carried through with a drive that reflected not merely his eagerness for mastery but his joy in living things out to the full. He studied French, German, and Spanish because he thought them necessary for his work; Arabic, Greek, and Sanskrit because they were difficult and, because difficult, a challenege; hieroglyphics because they were a riddle. His justification for learning the Morse code and shorthand was that he was interested in all methods of conveying thought, but this was not the only instance where the little boy in him had to be rationalized. -- vI p201

Galton was ont a mathematician but he was mathematically minded. He had what amounted to an obsession to count and measure (one of his maxims was: "Whenever you can, count"), and he applied this urge to anything and everything. In his laboratory he measured heads, noses, arms, legs, color of eyes and hair, breathing power, "strength of pull and of squeeze," keenness of sight and of hearing, reaction time, height, weight, and so on. He compiled statistics of the weather, of the properties of heiresses, of life span, of the inheritance of physical and mental characters. He counted the number of "fidgets" per miute among persons attending lectures--apparently to derive a coefficient of boredom. Middle-aged persons, he found, are medium fidgets, "children are raretly still, while elderly philosophers will sometimes remain rigid for minutes altogethere." He made a "beauty map" of the British Isles, classifying the girls he passed in the streets of various towns as "attractive, indifferent or repellent." The method he employed was to prick holes in a piece of paper, "torn rudely into a cross with a lon leg," which he concealed within his pocket. London ranked highest; Aberdeen lowest. -- vI p252

Then in 1918 [Russell] was sent to prison for pacifist propaganda. The specific charge against him was that he had written a pamplet accusing the United States Army of "intimidating strikes at home." By th eintervention of Arthur Balfour, prison life was made easier for him and he could read and write as much as he liked provided he did no propaganda. In four and a half months he wrote his famous Introduction to Mathematical Philosophy, a book that has brought to many of us the first heady experience of Russell's thought and style, and begane the work for his Analysis of Mind. The governor of the prison found these writings perplexing but unsubversive. Similarly, a warder found nothin objectionable in Russells reply to a question about his religion. When he said that he was an agnostic, the warder asked how to spell it and remarked with a sigh: "Well, there are many religions, but I suppose they all worship the same God." Russell says "this remark kept me cheerful for about a week." -- vII p46

It is easy to imagine that [Wittgenstein] frightened his students. He was impatient, irritable, insulting. He drove himself, scourged himself to achieve understanding, and was no more sparing of his class. THey respected his passionate honesty and, if not petrified, were spurred to hard mental exertion; but two hours of such severee and tense probing exhausted both teacher and pupils. When it was over, Wittegenstein, full of self-reproach, would eagerly seek relief from his ordeal. Often he would "rush off to a cinema immediately after the class ended," taking a friend with him. He would buy a bun or an execrable English cold pork pie and munch it while he watched the film. He insisted on sitting in the front row so that the screen "would occupy his entire field of vision, and his mind would be turned away from the thoughts of the lecture and his feelings of revulsion." No matter how wretched the picture, he became totally absorbed in it. -- vII p62

White suggests dividing the philosophers of the twentieth century into two groups, hedgehogs and foxes. The image (recently revived by Sir Isaiah Berlin in an essay on Tolstoy) is from a line of the Greek poet Archilochus which says: "The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing." We must not expect too much of this image, but it serves to contrast two main tendenceies. On one side are teh metaphysicists, the builders of monuments, who try to see the world in terms of a central concept which is to organized all their attitudes and beliefs. These are the hedgehogs. In their systems there is a place for everything and everyone; all that the seen and unseen world has been, is, and will be is explained. Their philosophies may not always be a comfort, but they are always complete. There are no loose ends or exceptions; loneliness and starfish, molecules and bills of lading, greed and galaxies, time and art are embraced in a single vision. The other tendency is both more modest and more arrogant. Its followers have a poor opinion of metaphysics They deny that hilosophy has to do with world views, that it has any business pronouncing grandly on religion, politics, morals, art or even science. Their tradition offers little support either to political or religious movements, which is one of the reasons why it has so many detractors. The logical-analysis foxes would like to know many little things--instead of one big thing--but they are content to know even one thing, pvoided they can get to know it very well. One may vary the image of the foxes, and think of the second tendency as surgial. Using the sharpest possible instruments of logic and mathematics, these surgeons of philosophy are intent on excising small muddles that, if untended, may grow into big muddles. The object of attention is not the world or man or marols, but sequences of reasoning, sentences, even single words. Logical analysts are philosophers interested in the causes and cure of philosophy. In time they hope to put themselves out of business. -- vII pp69-70

Related

• REA Problem Solvers Statistics, a handy set of worked problems.
• Introduction to Statistical Inference, a much less approachable or applicable textbook on the theoretical underpinnings of statistical inference.