No-Nonsense Guide to Science
Science is still the great intellectual adventure, but now it is also seen as an instrument of profit, power, and privilege. Wrongly used, it might yet make the 21st century our last.To make sense of all this, we need to let go of old ideas and assumptions.
In the No-Nonsense Guide to Science, Jerome Ravetz introduces the “post-normal” way of thinking about science. We are to transcend the old simplistic ideas of perfect certainty and objectivity in science–they have failed to protect people and the environment when science has gone wrong and they have enabled flat, dogmatic teaching in our schools. We must now accept that value-loading, uncertainty, and ignorance are very real parts of science, and that citizens must participate in the policies that shape its evolution.
The book also includes a refreshing new look at the history of science, and concludes with a series of questions that anyone can use to start their own exploration of the present and future of science.
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Praise
The No-Nonsense Guide to Science provides a penetrating insight into how science works.
– Ziauddin Sardar, writer, broadcaster and author of Introducing Science and Why Do People Hate America?
Contents
| Foreword | by Tom Blundell |
| Introduction | |
| Chapter 1 | Science Now |
| Chapter 2 | How Science Change Reality |
| Chapter 3 | Second Thoughts from History |
| Chapter 4 | Little Science, Big Science, Mega Science |
| Chapter 5 | Scientific Objectivity |
| Chapter 6 | Uncertainty |
| Chapter 7 | Science and Democracy |
| Chapter 8 | People's Science |
| Chapter 9 | Science, Its Future and You |
| Contacts | |
| Bibliography | |
| Index |
