Anthony M. Alioto

In A History of Western Science, Anthony M. Alioto traces the development of science in society from ancient Egypt through the twentieth century. He writes, “Different ages have had different goals, have held different values, have asked different questions; their answers, their science, have assumed forms conditions by, indeed dependent upon, these goals, values, and questions” (pg. 2). He continues, “If this unique blend of imposing our symbols upon nature and transforming what we perceive accordingly is the hallmark of homo sapiens, we can thus assert that science has been around from the very beginning of the species” (pg. 3). Finally, he concludes, “The great challenge has always been to grasp the order of nature in thought and so to rise above the unpredictable. This history of science is the story of how human beings have met this challenge. Some past attempts to meet this challenge seem to us crude; our challenge remains to forge the historical link between ourselves and our distant relatives – and to do so less crudely” (pg. 4).
Examining the Roman period, Alioto writes, “Synthesized accounts of scientific ideas need not be necessarily inferior or misleading, and when they are done rigorously and with intellectual integrity they serve the important role of disseminating knowledge to the general public” (pg. 95). Turning to the Middle Ages, Alioto continues, “The basic Aristotelian system of the physical universe remained virtually intact until the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries” (pg. 146). Later, “the so-called Renaissance, in its obsession with antiquity, was a reaction – sterile, without scientific substance, a hindrance. After all, its subject matter was not science but the studia humanitatis, the disciplines of rhetoric, history, poetry, and moral philosophy” (pg. 161).
Moving forward, Alioto writes, “Galileo changed both the language and the tasks of physical science. With Galileo metaphysical questions are pushed into the background, and pure sensate experience is restricted and even given up for formal descriptive mechanisms” (pg. 193). Examining Newton, Alioto writes, “Newton was still a mathematical philosopher and a follower of mechanism. His approach to physical mechanics was similar to Galileo’s. Beginning with idealized mathematics, which have little connection to physical situations, Newton deduces consequences, compares observations and experiments to the data, and corrects or alters his idealized system when necessary. Only after this process is a physical system of the world announced, based upon the necessary mathematical and observational conclusions” (pg. 224). Following this, “The development of physical science after Newton was much more complex. Perhaps Newton’s science was the center of the garden; yet, there were other traditions – Descartes, Leibniz, Huygens, not to mention other scientific gardens in other fields of the human endeavor to understand the world. And for the first time the world beyond the garden was beginning to take note of its crops – science was about to enter the social consciousness” (pg. 252).
Following Darwin, “Natural history was expanding time much as Copernicus had inflated the cosmic sphere. As time expanded, so did the human imagination. Gazing at the rocks, the fossils, the species themselves, naturalists could now envision the slow and nearly invisible mach of time, operating before their eyes, regular yet dynamic” (pg. 273). While other sciences could engage in experimentation, physicists ha to observe at a distance. Alioto writes, “Phenomena including heat, light, electricity, and magnetism could be reduced, like gravity, to mathematical mechanical models based upon forces and matter – and imponderable fluids. Action at a distance was the one burr in the symmetry” (pg. 302). As a result of this, “Physics up to the 1920s held firmly to a doctrine which can be traced back ultimately to Aristotle” (pg. 336). Even “Bohr’s atom was really a potpourri of classical and quantum ideas, not unlike the amalgamation of different body parts that made up the Ptolemaic hybrid” (pg. 341). By the end of the nineteenth century, scientists and their organizations began calling for “government and private endowments of research in which science would be cultivated as a national resource” (pg. 317). Alioto concludes, “While science has thus established itself as the preeminent force in the dynamics of recent history, its very successes have in turn had a profound influence upon science itself. One of the great ironies is that many of the discoveries from which technology springs had their origin in purely theoretical exercises of the imagination, directed mainly by curiosity or unsolved esoteric problems which were of interest only to a small, relatively isolated group” (pg. 377).… (meer)

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I didn't finish this one either, but don't blame it on the book - blame it on the reader. This is actually a text used in introductory science courses at university ('science for arts students', if you know what I mean). It can be a little dry at times, but mostly it is actually quite interesting. I didn't make it very far - up to the end of the Greeks, if I remember correctly - so all I can do is repeat over and over that 'it is actually quite interesting.' It is well-written and explains much of the history and workings of science in fairly plain language. I've shelved it for now, but I do plan on returning to it someday. I only know the very basic outlines of science's history, and with some of the other books I've been reading, I'd certainly like to learn more. But sometimes, you're just not ready to tackle a book, and Western Science, today was not your day. (To be fair, part of the problem is that this was the book I accidentally dropped behind my bookcase, and it took a few weeks to fish it out again, by which point I had completely and utterly lost any desire to continue reading it.)… (meer)