The first two chapters survey the growth of science since the 17th century and attempt to sketch the leading ideas of physics and biology from that time to our own. Regrettably, the writing is fiat-footed and reveals no gift for illuminating simplification or explanatory unification. Readers will put down these chapters with no more real insight into thermodynamics or Bell's theorem than they brought to the work.
What is worse, these chapters show no influences of the revolution in the history, philosophy and sociology of science wrought over the last two decades. Scientific change is blithely described as cumulating progress unobstructed by anything before quantum mechanics. Now, Brown is right to hold that science is in fact cumulative and progressive, but failing to show that these views are today at least controversial, indeed rejected by well-informed writers on science, does the reader a profound disservice.
In the third chapter of ...
