Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #355552 in Books
• Published on: 2003-01-01
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 500 pages

Customer Reviews

Poorly written, poorly footnoted, not up to par
This book is surprisingly weak for a university text. Looking beyond the amateurish looking layout, there are numerous factual errors, typos, and misleading statements in this supposedly "scientific" book. And it goes without saying that the numerous cliches are cringe worthy.

It almost seems that Professor Byron Wall just wanted to quickly write up a textbook he could sell to his class. Wall claims in his introduction that he doesn't need to footnote because everything he writes about "is well known" and "agreed upon" by historians. Obviously, as any student of history knows, historians rarely agree on everything. This is frequently demonstrated by stories like Galileo's pendulum, which he fails to mention that not only is there no evidence for this legend of Galileo's childhood, it is also factually incorrect that, as he appears to suggest, a pendulum maintains constant speed.

When he is not agreeing with false Renaissance hypotheses, he smugly insults Aristotle's theories as "silly." He also frequently block quotes huge parts of scientist's books, which significantly slows down the book and has no purpose for this only introductory level book. And finally, presumably because he is a math professor as well, he lectures on about mathematical theories which have little importance to the main argument of the book and are widely distracting to the subject and wastes significant space. There are undoubtedly many, many, superior books about the history of science than this one.

amreena hussain
Professor Wall does a wonderful job of providing the reader with a complete history of science and the method of science. The evolution of scientific theory starts off with the beginning of man and takes you into the world of the ancient greeks upto the world of genetics. If one has ever wondered about the history of science this is the book to read! By the way he's my professor at York University and he's amazing.