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From Certainty to Uncertainty: The Story of Science and Ideas in the Twentieth Century

by F. David Peat (Author)

At the same time that 20th-century science brought unprecedented advances, it also led to the growing awareness of the limitations of scientific knowledge itself. Through wonderfully concise, clear metaphors, physicist Peat (Infinite Potential) traces the philosophy of science from the 19th through the 20th centuries, showing how the earlier era¡s faith in the reliability of scientific research, and its belief that it was theoretically possible to predict the behavior of everything from particles to people, was abruptly shaken in the 20th century. Peat focuses especially on how the theory of relativity, quantum mechanics and chaos theory brought about cataclysmic changes in our worldview.

Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

This short book has a very ambitious aim: to cover the history of thought in the 20th century - in areas as diverse as science, philosophy and the arts - and to chart the way that in each field prevailing views of the world have moved from absolute conviction to its opposite. In his preface, Peat looks at the year 1900 and the dominant beliefs held by intellectuals of the time. In the area of science, Newton's physics seemed to have explained everything about the way the physical world worked; Europe had entered a period of peace, prosperity and stability; new technological inventions such as sound recording and the telephone promised to make the world a better place. 100 years later, says Peat, and it was all in tatters. Two world wars and the dropping of the atom bombs put an end to the idea that humanity was becoming more civilized; the new quantum physics removed many of the certainties of the old physics; and the arts had succumbed to a postmodern philosophy that undermined every certainty about the value of art that had gone before. To cover all this in one book is a tall order, and Peat has a tendency to skim. It's never quite clear whether he's proposing an argument about why this has happened or simply providing a potted history of 20th-century ideas for the non-specialist reader. In practice, he does a little bit of both; and on the whole, the best bits of this book are when he's giving a straightforward, non-technical account of particular ideas. His explanation of quantum mechanics, always a difficult subject, is made much more comprehensible by being presented in terms of the arguments between Albert Einstein and Nils Bohr; the former never accepted Bohr's argument that there were no 'independent elements of reality'. Peat is also good at explaining the 20th century's changing views about art and language, and he finds interesting parallels between advances in art and advances in science - the fact that Seurat, for example, created paintings out of dots of pure colour at about the same time Planck was transforming light into individual quanta. He is on rather shakier ground when he tries to explain the reasons for these parallels, which, following Jung, he regards as 'manifestations of an actual change in human consciousness'. Similarly, the chapter in which he tackles the planet's environment, looking at the problems caused by DDT and antibiotics among other things, makes for thought-provoking reading, but seems to belong to a different book. But don't let any of this put you off. The book covers such a wide area, and Peat writes so lucidly, that almost any reader is bound to find something in it they didn't know before. It won't make you an expert in quantum physics or contemporary art, but it will give you plenty to think about. (Kirkus UK)

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