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Notes
Chapter 1. The Need to Override Experience
1. Heraclitus, fragment 12; Sweet (1995), p. 7.
2. Hume (1777/1910), p. 315.
3. The passage from pre-modern to modern science – the Scientific Revolution,
in capitals – in the 16th and 17th centuries has been described many times, e.g.,
Butterfield (1957), Hall (1956), Henry (2002) and Westfall (1971). Shapin (1998) is
recent and highly readable.
4. For different views of the scientific revolution in astronomy, see, e.g., Koyré
(1958), Kuhn (1957) and Margolis (1987, 1993).
5. Casper and Noer (1972), Chapters 4–7, Dugas (1955/1988) and Einstein and Infeld
(1938), Chapter 1.
6. The search for the chemical elements and the rules by which they combine is
described in Brock (1993), Greenaway (1966), McCann (1978), Strathern (2000)
and Toulmin and Goodfield (1962).
7. Shapin (1998), p. 32, italics in original. Other historians of science concur: “The
ideal of a clockwork universe was the great contribution of seventeenth-century
science to the eighteenth-century age of reason” (Butterfield, 1957, p. 150). And
again: “The mechanical philosophy saw the workings of the natural world by
analogy with machinery; change was brought about (and could be explained in
terms of) the intermeshings of bodies, like cogwheels in a clock, or by impact
and the transference of motion from one body to another” (Henry, 2002, p. 69).
Peterson (1993) associates the clock metaphor with the scientific revolution in
astronomy, but Ruse (2002) locates its origin in the works of Robert Boyle.
8. The physics of turbulence is complicated enough to be beyond my mathematical
competence; see Nelkin (1994). For present purposes the commonsense concept
suffices.
9. There are many attempts to summarize the essence of the complex systems rev-
olution in science for the educated layperson. Gleick (1987) was one of the first
and remains one of the best. Lewin (1992) and Waldrop (1992) are very readable.
Among serious introductions for people with scientific training, Ford (1992),
Laughlin (2005), Nicolis (1992) and Prigogine (1997) focus on physics, while
Camazine et al. (2001), Kauffman (1993) and Raff (1996) focus on the biological
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