Summary Of Steven Weinberg's To Explain The World

Steven Weinberg wrote a book called To Explain the World: The Discovery of Modern Science. In the book, he wants to elaborate on the early history of sciences. Weinberg says that he “not unwilling to criticize the methods and theories of the past from a modern viewpoint (Weinberg, xii).” This is a dilemma with Weinberg because he is placing presentism view into history. Presentism is putting modern day attitudes to interpret past events. This can also be called Whig History because it is a “bad way of writing history (Whig History, p.14).” This is different from historians because they are trying to understand the history of why or how people thought of the times. When putting modern views on the people of the ancient time, it puts people

Alchemy is seen as being “magic” or a fraud. When most people think of Alchemy they think of the people trying to change cheaper metals into gold, which well know today is a non-interconvertible element. It was upto the seventeen hundred the word alchemy and chemistry were used interchangeably. Alchemist made a huge contributions to today's modern world. People that practice alchemy help better the medicine of the time “ Of done by chemically extracting, treating, or purifying natural substances” (Principle, p. 37). Another contribution is they better the methods of smelting ore and working with the metals. There are still alchemistic methods changing chemical substances that are still used in chemistry, such as distillation, sublimation, and crystallization. These were not the only contributions that the alchemist taught us, it was some the experiments that they did that would teach us about the natural world. Just like astrology gave us famous astrologist there are famous alchemist too, just to name a couple is Robert Boyle the father of modern chemistry and Sir Isaac Newton one of the fathers of modern physics. In today's world when people do thing of alchemist they think of magic and sorcery. Look at the history without a modern view we can see that alchemist help advance that science

One example of this is the mystery of the world, Stonehenge. Today Stonehenge is a mystery of actually who built it and why it was built, but historians have a good guess of what it was used for. Gerald Hawkins thought Stonehenge could have used as a supercomputer to predict lunar eclipses. This is most likely drive putting modern ideas want to see that there were people more advance like our civilization today. Anthony Aveni the author of Stairways to the Stars: Skywatching in Three Great Ancient Cultures he talks about Richard Atkinson, an archaeologist who disagrees with Hawkin. Aveni writes “What bothered Atkinson more that all of the procedural complaints was that what Hawkins contended about the astronomical knowledge of Bronze Age society did not square with what we know of the people who built the great structure, who were regarded as barbarian (p.69).” This was a problem for Atkinson because it did not make sense for why farming and hunting people would want to keep track of the sun and moon. On top of this it would have taken years to get accurate measurements, and for a generation who did not have writing, it would be extremely difficult. There are historians that have good evidence that does suggest what Stonehenge was actually used for. Stonehenge itself was mostly used to a calendar. This is seen when the rising of the summer solstice the longest day of the year and setting