A Companion to the Physical Sciences by David KnightReview by: Stephen G. BrushIsis, Vol. 81, No. 4 (Dec., 1990), p. 744Published by: The University of Chicago Press on behalf of The History of Science SocietyStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/233829 .

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744 BOOK REVIEWS-ISIS, 81: 4: 309 (1990)

the book offers a not-unfair representation of the state of the discipline in Italy, still suspended between amateurism and pro- fessionalization.

GIOVANNI BATTIMELLI

David Knight. A Companion to the Physi- cal Sciences. [iv] + 177 pp., index. Lon- don/New York: Routledge, 1989. $25, Can $32.50.

"History," David Knight says (p. 74), "is what this whole book is about." But he means history used to explain science to scientists and students, and seems skeptical about the sociological turn of recent histori- cal writing. Those historians of science who have studied ordinary rather than great scientists and celebrated "marginal men" have ended up by writing "history of science with the science left out." They failed to arouse "excitement among practi- tioners of other disciplines" and thus be- came marginal men themselves (p. 75).

Since there are now many good reference works in which one can locate the dry facts about the history of science, Knight feels free, in this collection of essays ranging from a paragraph to a couple of pages in length, to concentrate on whatever happens to interest him. Most deal with words and concepts. Some have well-selected refer- ences to scholarly sources, but others may mystify the reader who does not already have some familiarity with the history of science.

The entry "prediction" illustrates both the strengths and the weaknesses of the book. Knight perceptively notes that if the claim of "some philosophers"-that predic- tion is the major aim of science-were ac- curate, then weather forecasting would be the paradigm among the sciences. (The reader is expected to know that it is not.) He also states that while successful predic- tions have helped to establish gravitational theory, the periodic table, and quantum mechanics, theories now considered erro- neous have also led to successful predic- tions. Other theories like Darwinian evolu- tion are obviously valuable to science even if some Popperians complain that they do not make testable predictions. (The author might have noted that Karl Popper himself switched his views on this point.) But Knight fails to point out the important fact that scientists use the word "prediction" to include deduction of already-known facts;

he implies, misleadingly, that prediction is merely an extrapolation into the future of "past instances, given the support of theory" (p. 120); and he makes inaccurate statements about predictions such as the "white spot" in the wave theory of light (cf. John Worrall's article in The Uses of Ex- periment, edited by David Gooding et al., Cambridge, 1989).

Historians of science will find a lot to criticize in this book, but I think it does succeed in its stated goal of using history to instruct and entertain the general scientific reader.

STEPHEN G. BRUSH

Joseph Needham. Science and Civilisation in China. Volume V: Chemistry and Chem- ical Technology. Part 9: Textile Technol- ogy: Spinning and Reeling, by Dieter Kuhn. xxxiv + 520 pp., illus., bibl., index. Cambridge/New York: Cambridge Univer- sity Press, 1988. $1 10.

China has long held a high reputation for early textile technology. Dieter Kuhn's comprehensive study of the origins and his- tory of Chinese spinning will thus be of great value both to sinologists and to histo- rians interested in the comparative devel- opment of Eastern and Western technol- ogy. The present book on spinning ,is the first of two volumes concerning textile technology planned for the Needham series on science and civilization in China. A companion volume by Dieter Kuhn on weaving is promised.

In India, believed by some scholars to be the source of the European spinning wheel, the major fiber was cotton. Cotton re- mained unimportant in China, however, until about A.D. 1000. The most important fibers for Kuhn's study are bast and silk. Kuhn begins by describing the bast fiber plants and Chinese methods of preparing bast fiber for spinning. The last half of his book describes silk manufacture: feeding and breeding of silk worms, cultivation of mulberry trees, and silk reeling. Kuhn also notes the importance of silk in Chinese reli- gion and mythology.

Evidence regarding Chinese spinning and reeling is both archaeological and textual. Kuhn devotes sixty pages to describing spindle whorls unearthed in Chinese arche- ological sites from as early as 4400 B.C. (For comparison, the oldest known textile is dated to 6000 B.C. and comes from Catal

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