বিজ্ঞানের চেতনা(হার্ডকভার)

Though the book is old but still gold. One of the best book I've read. The point of the story of Newton coming up with universal gravitation after being hit in the head with an apple is his realizing that the same gravity that applies to apples also applies to the Moon. Of course it was known before Newton that apples fell, and according to Bronowski, Aristotle explained a particular apple falling at a particular time by it being the nature of apples, or heavy things in general, to fall down. This doesn't seem like a good explanation to us, but it's not nonsense: "The mere creation of a permanent class of apples, the mere generalisation of the concept of apples, is an act of the first importance…. What nature provides is a tree full of apples which are all recognisably alike and yet are not identical, small apples and large ones, red ones and pale ones, apples with maggots and apples without. To make a statement about all these apples together, and about crab-apples, Orange Pippins, and Beauties of Bath, is the whole basis of reasoning." (chapter II, section 4) In chapter V, Bronowski talks about machines and models. He says that science demands that what it studies be a machine. The closest he comes to defining machine is that "A machine in science is a concept with definite properties which can be isolated, can be reproduced in space and in time, and whose behaviour can be predicted." He seems to be asserting that the world really is mechanical, although it's not clear to me if he means that the world would be mechanical without people to think about it or if we people come up with a mechanical order for the world; in the latter case, I don't see how this is different from models. He says that we make models that tell us how this machinery works: "The model sets up behind the machine a hypothetical world which yields the same ends. In the model, the steps by which these ends are reached from these beginnings are exhibited." The writing style was simply awesome