Chemical Education Today
Book & Media Reviews Scientific Laws, Principles and Theories: A Reference Guide by Robert E. Krebs Greenwood Press: Westport, CT, 2000. 416 pp. ISBN 0-313-30957-4. $65.00. reviewed by Pedro Bernal
This book is a collection of alphabetically arranged entries about laws, principles, and theories in the natural sciences and mathematics. It is designed for high school and college students as a reference guide to supplement the content of their textbooks. The entries describe and place in historical context a concept or theory to give students a sense of when and by whom it was developed and how it relates to previous explanations of the same or related phenomena. The entries are arranged alphabetically according to the name of the person credited with first proposing the theory or concept. The book has a glossary and the terms contained in it are highlighted in the text. A detailed index helps the reader find entries associated with a particular subject or person. The bibliography contains a number of useful sources, particularly for those readers interested in the historical and philosophical aspects of science. It should be noted that this is not a history-of-science dictionary. In the entries, theories, principles, and laws are not analyzed historically but are, rather, briefly described and placed in a time-line relative to others. That is as it should be for a book of this size and for the intended audience. The entries range widely in chemistry, physics, mathematics, and the biological sciences. Some of them are historical and philosophical in nature such as those on Bacon, Aristotle, Archimedes, and Descartes. Some are not about a theory, law, or principle at all but are rather statements of experimental results or methodologies. For instance, that the structure of organic molecules can be determined using X-rays is, like running a four-minute mile, the result of a lifetime of experimental work, and to refer to it as “Hodgkin’s Theory of Organic Molecular Structure” is misleading. In what sense is that a theory? Entries, in the main, are quite good and, properly used, will help students understand the material presented
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in their textbooks. The general reader with an interest in science will also benefit. The introduction to this book, however, will not be helpful to students. In the introduction, the author first talks about the nature of science and scientific theories, then defines and makes fine distinctions between laws, principles, hypothesis, and theories. These distinctions are made in a way that, regardless of their merit, will not be of benefit to the average reader, who may very well be encountering this topic for the first time. The image of science that emerges from the introduction differs from the one conveyed by a close reading of the entries. That, in part, is because the introduction is heavily influenced by a view of science, in vogue during the first half of last century, which tried to formalize the “scientific method” as a logical algorithm. This view assumed that all the natural sciences other than physics had a severe case of physics envy. The introduction relies heavily on quantum and Newtonian mechanics and general relativity as models of scientific theories, which they of course are. To use them exclusively as models of scientific theories at a time when great and exciting advances in the biological sciences are almost an everyday occurrence and in a book full of entries in the biological sciences broadly defined is simply anachronistic. In some instances there are errors, as when it is claimed (page 7) that a theory “must explain the law from which it was derived and be deduced from that law”. Is it the case that scientific theories are deduced from laws contained in them? Or, again, when a theory is described as “the end point of scientifically gathered evidence about specific events”. That some theory, however tentative, must guide the gathering of evidence is now widely accepted. Otherwise, how do we know what to gather evidence about? The introduction ignores a great deal of what has been learned about the nature of science from the history and philosophy of science over the last 50 years. My having made a number of negative observations, particularly about the introduction, should not obscure the fact that the entries will be useful to high school and college science students and that this book will be a good addition to science collections in libraries. Pedro Bernal is in the Department of Chemistry, Rollins College, Winter Park, FL 32789;
[email protected].
Journal of Chemical Education • Vol. 78 No. 8 August 2001 • JChemEd.chem.wisc.edu
