Paradigm Shift : How Expert Opinions Keep Changing on Life, the Universe, and Everything.

Cover -- Contents -- Front matter -- Title page -- Publisher information -- Introduction -- How to use this book -- Body matter -- Part I -- 1. Tales of Mice and Men -- 2. Discarding Fossilized Theories -- 3. The Brain Doctors -- 4. Inexplicable Diseases -- 5. Inexplicable Cures -- Part II -- 6. Physics' Guilty Secrets -- 7. Black Holes, God Particles, and Bombast -- 8. Spooky Coincidences and Amazing Insights -- Part III -- 9. Bubbles, Black Swans, and Banking Disasters -- 10. Climate Science and the Profits of Doom -- 11. The Risk Factor -- 12. African Art or High Street Kitsch? -- Afterword: Paradigm Shifts -- Back matter -- Notes and Key Sources -- About the Author -- Also available.

Why do giraffes have long necks? It can't really be for reaching tasty leaves since their main food is ground level bushes, tidy though that explanation would be. And how does relativity theory cope with the fact that the observable universe defies prediction by being far too small and anything but homogeneous? By inventing a vastly larger, but invisible, universe. And what exactly should we make of the scientists who claim to be witnessing thought itself, when the changes of blood flow in the brain that they observe are a thousand times slower than the neuronal activity it is supposed to reveal? A little scepticism is in order. Yet if philosophers of science, from Thomas Kuhn to Paul Feyerabend, have argued that science is a more haphazard process, driven by political fashion and short-term economic self-interest, today almost everyone seems to assume it is a vast jigsaw of interlocking facts pieced slowly but steadily together by expert practitioners. In this witty but profound 2.

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Electronic reproduction. Ann Arbor, Michigan : ProQuest Ebook Central, 2024. Available via World Wide Web. Access may be limited to ProQuest Ebook Central affiliated libraries.