The Oxford book of Modern Science writing

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The Oxford book of Modern Science writing is a 2008 book by Richard Dawkins which contains a collection of beautifully written scientific texts (all written after 1900) of well renowned scientists. The book overall is very interesting, and I will be be posting parts of it every while. Worth reading.

The introduction first:

Introduction My introductory remarks are distributed through the book itself, so I shall here limit myself mostly to acknowledgements. The idea for an an- thology of modern science writing was put to me by Latha Menon of Ox- ford University Press, and it was a pleasure to work with her on it. She and I had previously collaborated on a collection of my own occasional writings, and we slipped effortlessly back into the same synoptic vein as before. We disagreed only over whether or not to include anything from my own books. I won, and we didn’t. This is a collection of good writing by professional scientists, not excur- sions into science by professional writers. Another difference from John Carey’s admirableFaber Book of Science is that we go back only one century. Within that century, no attempt was made to arrange the pieces chronolog- ically. Instead, the selections fall roughly into four themes, although some of the entries could have fi tted into more than one of these divisions. My biggest regret concerns the number of excellent scientists that I have had to leave out, for reasons of space. I would apologize to them, did I not suspect that my own pain at their omission is greater than theirs. The collection is limited to the English language and, with very few exceptions, I have omit- ted translations from books originally composed in other languages. My wife, Lalla Ward, has again lent her fi nely tuned ear for the Eng- lish language, together with her unfailing encouragement. I remain deeply grateful to her. I have long wanted to dedicate a book to Charles Simonyi, but I was anx- ious to be clear that it was a dedication to him as an individual and friend, rather than as the munifi cent benefactor of the Oxford professorship in Public Understanding of Science that I hold. Now, in the year of my retire- ment, it fi nally seems appropriate to offer this volume to him as a personal friend, while at the same time conveying Oxford’s gratitude to a major benefactor through a book published by the University Press. Charles Si- monyi is a sort of combination of International Renaissance Man, Playboy of the Scientifi c World, Test Pilot of the Intellect, and Space-age Orbiter of the Mind as well as of the Planet. Although most of the words in an anthology belong to others, I hope that my love of science and of writing, which Charles shares and which he generously chose to encourage in me, will shine through both my selections and my commentary, and give him pleasure.

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I will start by a text for Carl Sagan : ‘THE DEMON-HAUNTED WORLD’
(I skipped the introduction of the scientist because the texts are already lengthy)

The Oxford book of Modern Science writing- Richard Dawkins [Science] is more than a body of knowledge; it is a way of thinking. I have a foreboding of an America in my children’s or grandchildren’s time—when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the key manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agen- das or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what’s true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and dark- ness. The dumbing down of America is most evident in the slow decay of substantive content in the enormously infl uential media, the 30- second sound bites (now down to 10 seconds or less), lowest common denominator programming, credulous presentations on pseudoscience and superstition, but especially a kind of celebration of ignorance. [. . .] We’ve arranged a global civilization in which most crucial elements— transportation, communications, and all other industries; agriculture, medicine, education, entertainment, protecting the environment; and even the key democratic institution of voting—profoundly depend on science and technology. We have also arranged things so that almost no one understands science and technology. This is a prescription for disaster. We might get away with it for a while, but sooner or later this combustible mixture of ignorance and power is going to blow up in our faces. A Candle in the Dark is the title of a courageous, largely Biblically based, book by Thomas Ady, published in London in 1656, attacking the witch-hunts then in progress as a scam ‘to delude the people’. Any ill- ness or storm, anything out of the ordinary, was popularly attributed to witchcraft. Witches must exist, Ady quoted the ‘witchmongers’ as argu- ing, ‘else how should these things be, or come to pass?’ For much of our history, we were so fearful of the outside world, with its unpredictable dangers, that we gladly embraced anything that promised to soften or ex- plain away the terror. Science is an attempt, largely successful, to under- stand the world, to get a grip on things, to get hold of ourselves, to steer a safe course. Microbiology and meteorology now explain what only a few centuries ago was considered suffi cient cause to burn women to death. Ady also warned of the danger that ‘the Nations [will] perish for lack of knowledge’. Avoidable human misery is more often caused not so much by stupidity as by ignorance, particularly our ignorance about ourselves. I worry that, especially as the millennium edges nearer, pseudo science and superstition will seem year by year more tempting, the siren song of unreason more sonorous and attractive. Where have we heard it be- fore? Whenever our ethnic or national prejudices are aroused, in times of scarcity, during challenges to national self-esteem or nerve, when we agonize about our diminished cosmic place and purpose, or when fanaticism is bubbling up around us—then, habits of thought familiar from ages past reach for the controls. The candle fl ame gutters. Its little pool of light trembles. Darkness gathers. The demons begin to stir. There is much that science doesn’t understand, many mysteries still to be resolved. In a Universe tens of billions of light years across and some ten or fi fteen billion years old, this may be the case forever. We are con- stantly stumbling on surprises. Yet some New Age and religious writers as- sert that scientists believe that ‘what they fi nd is all there is’. Scientists may reject mystic revelations for which there is no evidence except somebody’s say-so, but they hardly believe their knowledge of Nature to be complete. Science is far from a perfect instrument of knowledge. It’s just the best we have. In this respect, as in many others, it’s like democracy. Science by itself cannot advocate courses of human action, but it can certainly illuminate the possible consequences of alternative courses of action. The scientifi c way of thinking is at once imaginative and disciplined. This is central to its success. Science invites us to let the facts in, even when they don’t conform to our preconceptions. It counsels us to carry alternative hypotheses in our heads and see which best fi t the facts. It urges on us a delicate balance between no-holds-barred openness to new ideas, however heretical, and the most rigorous sceptical scrutiny of everything—new ideas and established wisdom. This kind of thinking is also an essential tool for a democracy in an age of change. One of the reasons for its success is that science has built-in, error- correcting machinery at its very heart. Some may consider this an over- broad characterization, but to me every time we exercise self-criticism, every time we test our ideas against the outside world, we are doing sci- ence. When we are self-indulgent and uncritical, when we confuse hopes and facts, we slide into pseudoscience and superstition. Every time a scientifi c paper presents a bit of data, it’s accompanied by an error bar—a quiet but insistent reminder that no knowledge is complete or perfect. It’s a calibration of how much we trust what we think we know. If the error bars are small, the accuracy of our empirical knowledge is high; if the error bars are large, then so is the uncertainty in our knowledge. Except in pure mathematics nothing is known for certain (although much is certainly false). Moreover, scientists are usually careful to characterize the veridical status of their attempts to understand the world—ranging from conjec- tures and hypotheses, which are highly tentative, all the way up to laws of Nature which are repeatedly and systematically confi rmed through many interrogations of how the world works. But even laws of Nature are not absolutely certain. There may be new circumstances never before examined—inside black holes, say, or within the electron, or close to the speed of light—where even our vaunted laws of Nature break down and, however valid they may be in ordinary circumstances, need correction. Humans may crave absolute certainty; they may aspire to it; they may pretend, as partisans of certain religions do, to have attained it. But the history of science—by far the most successful claim to knowledge ac- cessible to humans—teaches that the most we can hope for is succes- sive improvement in our understanding, learning from our mistakes, an asymptotic approach to the Universe, but with the proviso that absolute certainty will always elude us. We will always be mired in error. The most each generation can hope for is to reduce the error bars a little, and to add to the body of data to which error bars apply. The error bar is a pervasive, visible self- assessment of the reliability of our knowledge. You often see error bars in public opinion polls (‘an uncertainty of plus or minus three per cent’, say). Imagine a society in which every speech in the Congressional Record, every television commercial, every sermon had an accompany- ing error bar or its equivalent. One of the great commandments of science is, ‘Mistrust arguments from authority’. (Scientists, being primates, and thus given to dominance hierarchies, of course do not always follow this commandment.) Too many such arguments have proved too painfully wrong. Authorities must prove their contentions like everybody else. This independence of science, its occasional unwillingness to accept conventional wisdom, makes it dan- gerous to doctrines less self-critical, or with pretensions to certitude. Because science carries us toward an understanding of how the world is, rather than how we would wish it to be, its findings may not in all cases be immediately comprehensible or satisfying. It may take a little work to restructure our mindsets. Some of science is very simple. When it gets complicated, that’s usually because the world is complicated—or becausewe’re complicated. When we shy away from it because it seems too diffi cult (or because we’ve been taught so poorly), we surrender the ability to take charge of our future. We are disenfranchised. Our self- confi dence erodes. But when we pass beyond the barrier, when the fi ndings and methods of science get through to us, when we understand and put this knowledge to use, many feel deep satisfaction. This is true for everyone, but especially for children—born with a zest for knowledge, aware that they must live in a future moulded by science, but so often convinced in their adolescence that science is not for them. I know personally, both from having science explained to me and from my attempts to explain it to others, how gratify- ing it is when we get it, when obscure terms suddenly take on meaning, when we grasp what all the fuss is about, when deep wonders are revealed. In its encounter with Nature, science invariably elicits a sense of reverence and awe. The very act of understanding is a celebration of joining, merging, even if on a very modest scale, with the magnifi cence of the Cosmos. And the cumulative worldwide build-up of knowledge over time converts science into something only a little short of a trans- national, trans-generational meta-mind. ‘Spirit’ comes from the Latin word ‘to breathe’. What we breathe is air, which is certainly matter, however thin. Despite usage to the con- trary, there is no necessary implication in the word ‘spiritual’ that we are talking of anything other than matter (including the matter of which the brain is made), or anything outside the realm of science. On occa- sion, I will feel free to use the word. Science is not only compatible with spirituality; it is a profound source of spirituality. When we recognize our place in an immensity of light years and in the passage of ages, when we grasp the intricacy, beauty and subtlety of life, then that soaring feel- ing, that sense of elation and humility combined, is surely spiritual. So are our emotions in the presence of great art or music or literature, or of acts of exemplary selfl ess courage such as those of Mohandas Gandhi or Martin Luther King Jr. The notion that science and spirituality are somehow mutually exclusive does a disservice to both.