Richard Olson's magisterial two-volume work, Science Deified and Science Defied asks how, why, to what extent, and with what consequences scientific ideas have influenced Western culture. In Volume 2, Olson turns to Cartesianism and the extension of mathematical and mechanical philosophies that branched into every aspect of seventeenth-century thought.

The editor-in-chief of "Skeptic" magazine and author of the bestselling "Why People Believe Weird Things" takes readers to the place where real science (such as the big bang theory), borderland science (superstring theory), and just plain nonsense (Big Foot) collide with one another. 20 halftones. 36 line illustrations.

The 19th century produced scientific and cultural revolutions that forever transformed modern European life. Richard Olson provides an integrated account of the history of science and its impact on intellectual and social trends of the day.

Steven Shapin argues that science, for all its immense authority and power, is and always has been a human endeavor, subject to human capacities and limits. Put simply, science has never been pure. To be human is to err, and we understand science better when we recognize it as the laborious achievement of fallible, imperfect, and historically situated human beings. Shapin’s essays collected here include reflections on the historical relationships between science and common sense, between science and modernity, and between science and the moral order. They explore the relevance of physical and social settings in the making of scientific knowledge, the methods appropriate to understanding science historically, dietetics as a compelling site for historical inquiry, the identity of those who have made scientific knowledge, and the means by which science has acquired credibility and authority. This wide-ranging and intensely interdisciplinary collection by one of the most distinguished historians and sociologists of science represents some of the leading edges of change in the scholarly understanding of science over the past several decades.

The author (speech communication, Indiana U.) divides the subject into six chapters on the rhetorical ecology of science; philosophical perspectives--of propositions, procedures and politics; historical and social studies of science; demarcating science rhetorically; science and creation science; and cold fusion. In his discussion of cold fusion, he describes it not as a case study in how "nonscientific behavior sullied the public ethos of real science," but rather as a case that serves to "alert us to the inescapably human dimensions of real science so that we might appreciate its strengths without wishing away its imperfections." The bibliography is extensive. For scholars in the field. Paper edition (unseen), $22.95. Annotation copyright by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR