Book Review (2) Science through the Looking Glass - What do Scientists really know?

Title   'Science through the Looking Glass - What do Scientists really know?'
Author  E. Brian Davies, King's College London
Publisher   Oxford University Press, 2003 £25.00
ISBN 0198525435, x+295 pages hardback

The photograph * of the author on the dust jacket is a good introduction to this book. The author's enigmatic and attractive smile indicates that he is going to cover a huge number of topics and persuade his readers that they know a great deal less about them than they thought they did. In the meantime, he is going to have a great deal of fun, and to make sure that his readers do too! In the preface, Brian Davies, himself a mathematician, makes this prediction: In spite of the fact that highly mathematical theories often provide very accurate predictions, we should not, on that account, think that such theories are true, or that nature is governed by mathematics. In fact, the scientific theories most likely to be around in a thousand years' time are those which are the least mathematical - for example evolution, plate tectonics, and the existence of atoms.

And in all of his brushes with theories and theoreticians, philosophers and theologians, theories with which he disagrees are treated with respect and moderation. About the only time he uses the word anger is on page 72, where he presents a problem that is impossible to solve and comments:

>I frequently hear mathematicians saying that such questions pose no problem 'in principle'. This phrase makes me quite angry. It might mean, 'I know it is not actually possible but would like to close my mind and pretend that I could do it if I really wanted to'. Another possible meaning is, 'I do not regard the difficulty of carrying out a task as an interesting issue.' Either interpretation leaves the speaker cut off from the mainstream of human activities.

Such attitudes make this reviewer angry too!

The book is a good mix of mathematics/science with linguistics/philosophy. The are chapters dealing with pure mathematics, probability theory, astronomy geology and biological evolution exploring the nature of knowledge about them. There must always be some mistake for a reviewer to find somewhere in a book, and I certainly have not spotted many. I can do no worse than point out that Davies is wrong in stating (p 211) that ¹³C is a radioactive isotope. This isotope is indeed responsible for a lot of our knowledge about the world, but precisely because it is not radioactive! These "scientific" chapters are enclosed between the outer chapters on language and reductionism, and the whole is both convincing and enjoyable.

The final chapters are, naturally the most speculative. He attempts to explain the difference between "empiricist" and "realist" theories of science, and has to be content "with a description of science as it now is, and to attribute goals only to individual scientists." (p. 270). One of the most delightful bits occurs in the discussion of anthropic principles, where Davies points out how easy it is to produce a bogus coincidence, and he supplies the one that he "found ... by playing around for a few minutes with powers of pi": It concerns the ratio of the masses of the proton and the electron: m_p/m_e = 6π⁵, with an in error of less than 0.002%. This is a matter which needs to be emphasised in all fields. Probably the most elegant spoof of all of this genre is R.A. Knox's "proof" from remarkable cryptograms that Tennyson's In Memoriam was actually written by Queen Victoria (Essays in Satire Sheed and Ward, 1954).

His humane approach is gently put on p. 253: "Science is a system of thought, and should not claim to have a monopoly on the truth. But neither can its achievements be dismissed as of no import." This has come a long way from Sigmund Freud's noted summation: "No, our science is no illusion. But an illusion it would be to suppose that what science cannot give us we can get elsewhere." (The Future of an Illusion,1927).

Finally, a quote from p 213:
"The most severe criticism of extreme religious fundamentalism is not that it is wrong (scientists are also sometimes wrong), but that it discourages people from trying to understand the marvellously complicated world around us."

For those who do wish to understand more about this world, here is a book that can be strongly recommended.

Bob Gould