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PREFACE ix PROLOGUE What Is Science? 3 PART I. EXPLORING THE FRONTIERSOF SCIENCE: HOW NEW DISCOVERIES ARE MADE IN THE SCIENCES 9 CHAPTER 1 ABird's Eye View: The Many Routes to Scientific Discovery 11 CHAPTER 2Nature's jigsaw: Looking for Patterns As a Key to Discovery 26 CHAPTER 3 NewVistas: Expanding Our World with Instrumentation 35 CHAPTER 4 Close, But NoCigar: Discrepancies As a Trigger to Discovery 42 CHAPTER 5 Ingredients fora Revolution: Thematic Imagination, Precise Measurements, and the Motions ofthe Planets 52 PART II. MENTAL TACTICS: SOME DISTINCTIVELY SCIENTIFICAPPROACHES TO THE WORLD 67 CHAPTER 6 A Universe in a Bottle: Models,Modeling, and Successive Approximation 69 CHAPTER 7 Thinking Straight:Evidence, Reason, and Critical Evaluation 89 CHAPTER 8 The Numbers Game:Uses of Quantitative Reasoning 107 PART III. LARGER QUESTIONS: THE CONTEXTOF SCIENCE 123 CHAPTER 9 Ultimate Questions: Science and Religion 125CHAPTER 10 More Practical Questions: Science and Society 133 CHAPTER 11Difficult and Important Questions: Science, Values, and Ethics 145 CHAPTER12 Questions of Authenticity: Science, Pseudoscience, and How to Tell theDifference 158 CHAPTER 13 Contentious Questions: The Shadowy Borderlands ofScience 174 CHAPTER 14 Very Abstract Questions: The Philosophy of Science189 CHAPTER 15 Questions of Legitimacy: The Postmodern Critique of Science207 PART IV COMMON GROUND: SOME UNIFYING CONCEPTS IN THE SCIENCES 215CHAPTER 16 Fleas and Giants: Some Fascinating Insights about Area, Volume,and Size 217 CHAPTER 17 The Edge of the Abyss: Order and Disorder in theUniverse 230 CHAPTER 18 Riding Blake's Tiger: Symmetry in Science, Art, andMathematics 252 CHAPTER 19 The Straight and Narrow: Linear Dependence in theSciences 274 CHAPTER 20 The Limits of the Possible: Exponential Growth andDecay 285 CHAPTER 21 In the Loop: Feedback, Homeostasis, and Cybernetics 295EPILOGUE So, What Is Science? 303 INDEX 305