Allan Franklin

I bought this book because I think the greatest shortcoming of most accounts of quantum mechanics and nuclear physics is the lack of description of the experiments that provide the data for the phenomena under description. The theory is several steps removed from the actual experience of the data. The author, in the conclusion, does air the objections of those who insist on sense data, not data derived from instruments and calculations, but dismisses this by pointing out that unaided human perception is notoriously unreliable. This book was written in response to those who argue that science is a culturally and sociologically determined enterprise, and that science is a myth, that experiments are inductive exercises that only show what scientists want them to show. The author argues from the history of the theory and experimental evidence for the neutrino that the experimental evidence shaped the thinking about the neutrino, and that scientists were swayed and admitted error. The physics in this book was somewhat over my head, many descriptions of experiments and assertions about theory were simply assumed to be familiar, and the detail of the descriptions was dense.… (meer)