The Knowledge Machine

How Irrationality Created Modern Science

By: Michael Strevens

Narrated by: Julian Elfer

A paradigm-shifting work that revolutionizes our understanding of the origins and structure of science.

Captivatingly written, interwoven with historical vignettes ranging from Newton's alchemy to quantum mechanics to the storm surge of Hurricane Sandy, Michael Strevens' wholly original investigation of science asks two fundamental questions: Why is science so powerful? And why did it take so long, 2,000 years after the invention of philosophy and mathematics, for the human race to start using science to learn the secrets of nature? The Knowledge Machine's radical answer is that science calls on its practitioners to do something irrational: By willfully ignoring religion, theoretical beauty, and, especially, philosophy - essentially stripping away all previous knowledge - scientists embrace an unnaturally narrow method of inquiry, channeling unprecedented energy into observation and experimentation.

Like Yuval Harari's Sapiens or Thomas Kuhn's 1962 classic, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, The Knowledge Machine overturns much of what we thought we knew about the origins of the modern world.

©2020 Michael Strevens (P)2020 HighBridge, a division of Recorded Books

An exceptionally good book

A great analysis of the foundations of modern science. A very well written book that draws on the author's vast knowledge of the history of science and presents some fantastic insights on what has made the scientific method so successful.

Awe

This is an important read . We live in elegance and order. The author shares his understanding and it is wonder..

The best book I have consumed in a very long time.

Hard to overstate the breadth of so short a work, The Knowledge Machine attempts to explain the rationality, irrationality, objective and subjective pieces that come together to form science and it's demarcation from natural philosophy. A must read for any science or science adjacent person.

Fascinating story of how science came to be

Strevens gives a strong and historically well illustrated account of the development of modern science. His claim is that science took so long to fully develop because it requires a type of irrationality - an unreasonable narrowing of thought. As far as it goes, the book is strong and enjoyable to read. My main complaint is that Strevens does little to clarify other types of reasoning and where they might play an important role that science alone cannot fulfill.

Beautifully written, fascinating thesis

Strevens must have studied the flowers of rhetoric, because this book is so beautifully written. The thesis is that science is successful and has so much continuity because it demands an "irrational" separation between cold, empirical reporting and the aesthetic judgements of individual scientists (who are nonetheless permitted to express their views informally). Strevens argues that this kind of separation is unnatural and counterintuitive, and that it was only in the peculiar, Newtonian, post 30 Years War milieu of 17th century Europe that such a separation could arise.

Overall, I find the argument compelling, but I'm not expert enough to pronounce judgment on its correctness. I was hoping to hear the author connect his theory with Bayesian models of inquiry, but I think I know how he might do that.

If you think science is a simple matter of falsification, this book will help set you straight. Either way, this was a really fun listen.