Abstract
IF YOU THINK OF ISAAC NEWTON what image comes to mind? Is it an upright man with Restoration curls who, prism in hand, calmly explains the splitting of light to an attentive audience? Is it a dishevelled sage with tatty cuffs who, lost in thought under a tree, is hit by a falling apple and — eureka!? Is it a desiccated don who, prowling the cloisters like a wild beast, has reduced everything to an equation in his masterpiece, the Principia? Or is it a sulphur-soiled alchemist who, half mad with mercury poisoning, distills reason as a mere byproduct of the true search for the elixir of life?
One of the most painful circumstances of recent advances in science is that each one of them makes us know less than we thought we did.
Bertrand Russell
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Further Reading and References
Newton: the Making of Genius, by Patricia Fara is published by Picador (2003).
The Philosophy of Science: a Very Short Introduction, by Samir Okasha, published by Oxford University Press (2002), does what it says on the cover.
Thomas Kuhn’s revolutionary ideas are in his 1963 book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (University of Chicago Press).
Karl Popper’s revolutionary ideas are in his 1959 book The Logic of Scientfic Discovery (Hutchinson).
A very useful summary of issues in the philosophy of science comes from a discussion Brian Magee had with Hilary Putnam, reproduced in Talking Philosophy, published by Oxford University Press (1978), Chapter 12, from which the Putnam quotes are taken.
Kuhn vs Popper: the Struggle for the Soul of Science, by Steve Fuller is published by Icon (2003).
The quote of Werner Heisenberg is from his Physics and Philosophy, published by Penguin Books (1989), on page 167.
Our Final Century? Will the Human Race Survive the 21st Century?, by Martin Rees is published by Arrow (2004).
Richard Dawkins’s essay ‘The Sacred and the Scientist’ is in Ben Rogers’s Is Nothing Sacred?, published by Routledge (2004), with the quote on page 137.
The Story of God, by Robert Winston, is published by Bantam Press (2005).
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© 2007 Mark Vernon
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Vernon, M. (2007). Cosmologists and Darwinists: the Limits of Science. In: After Atheism. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-230-28903-1_3
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