By the time you finish this course, you'll have a different perspective on how to assess the "truth" of scientific theories. Goldman takes us painstakingly and at great length (perhaps too great) through the history of how scientists and philosophers have handled the question of how scientists know what they know. Are they making observations of true facts of nature, or is everything just our experience of nature, and, therefore, something that can't be proven as absolutely real. The argument swings back and forth and there are some clever end runs to redefine the problem. The answer does matter, but Goldman points out, as he does in his other Teaching Company Course, Science in the 20th Century, that what science knows is always evolving. There is no good reason to think that what we "know" in 2018 won't look as out-of-date and often as wrong as when we now look back on the science of 1918. Goldman deeply cares about the subject, but his delivery here is not as smooth as in the other course. He sometimes stumbles over words and as he moves around during the lecture, he rarely looks directly at the audience (i.e., into the camera). Still, for most passages he moves along very smoothy, and he talks very fast. I think the topic could have been covered more concisely, perhaps in just 12 lectures, and still made its points, but I certainly don't regret spending this time with Goldman. I streamed this on The Great Courses Plus, and I highly recommend a subscription to anyone with a yearning to keep learning. ( )

I've been checking the Great Courses series out of my public library, and have have been listening to them for years. Most are superb; but Steven Goldman's The Science Wars: What Scientists Know and How They Know It is so fundamentally flawed as to be an embarrassment for them to have in their collection.

This is a philosophy course whose aim is to show how the discoveries of science relate to what is truly real, which is to me a valid and interesting question. He is full fascinating of stories about philosophers and scientists throughout history, and how they have dealt with this issue.

However, he gets it stunningly, horribly wrong in the one part of the story I actually know reasonably well― the evolution from Newton's theories of motion to Einstein's. What's profound about this development is that Einstein didn't simply invalidate Newton; he showed how a universe in which Newton's Laws had been very well confirmed to be true (in cases, it so happens, where nothing was moving anywhere near the speed of light) could be tweaked in a way that was subtle and profound to embrace a more complete picture of reality.

For Goldman, however, there is no evolution in scientific understanding, only revolution. There is no way in which Newton's picture could remain true in any sense whatsoever after Einstein, or – critically for him – how it could have been “really true” when Newton formulated it. Newton's Laws, in his presentation, are every bit as discredited as the theory of phlogiston. He underscores his lack of understanding by absurdly declaring that engineers, when building a bridge, use an incorrect (i.e. Newtonian) theory of mechanics. This is totally wrong; for bridge-building, Newtonian mechanics agrees with Einstein's mechanics to every last digit of accuracy engineers need.

Some reviewers thought that Goldman has an axe to grind, and perhaps that's the best explanation for this otherwise thoughtful professor to misrepresent the nature of scientific progress so badly. Perhaps that's true: towards the end of the course, he discusses the possible validity of the theory of Intelligent Design, as advocated by Michael Behe, whom he identifies as a colleague. (For those not familiar, this “theory” was devised as an attempt to dress up Christian Biblical Creationism to look like a scientific theory specifically so that it could be taught in public schools.) Goldman concludes that Intelligent Design is not “scientific”, but still might be worthy of consideration. That conclusion is a lot more plausible if you've bought into the way he's sold science short in his previous exposition. ( )