Book Review—Faith and Wisdom in Science by Tom McLeish

Alan Gijsbers is the president of ISCAST.

Excerpt

The book is ambitious on a number of fronts. First it seeks to make science much less nerdy and much more accessible to the ordinary lay person in the street. In doing so he suggests that we replace the ‘hard’ concept of science with the ‘softer’ older concept of natural philosophy – a love of the wisdom of nature. And he communicates that love through the enthusiasm with which he presents so many different aspects of physics and beyond. I learn a bit more about the order of creation through quantum mechanics and the like but I learnt a lot more about the physics of complex systems – like the double pendulum and beyond, leading to ‘wicked’ problems of chaotic conditions like weather forecasting and the even more fraught ‘science’ of earthquake prediction.

Download Review (pdf, 314kB)