Making 20th century science: how theories became knowledge

Historically, the scientific method has been said to require proposing a theory, making a prediction of something not already known, testing the prediction, and giving up the theory (or substantially changing it) if it fails the test. A theory that leads to several successful predictions is more likely to be accepted than one that only explains what is already known but not understood. This process is widely treated as the conventional method of achieving scientific progress, and was used throughout the twentieth century as the standard route to discovery and experimentation. But does science.

Cover; Series; Making 20th Century Science; Copyright; Dedication; Contents; List of Illustrations; Preface; Part One The Reception and Evaluation of Theories in the Sciences; 1 Who Needs the Scientific Method?; 1.1 The Rings of Uranus; 1.2 Maxwell and Popper; 1.3 What is a Prediction? A Mercurial Definition; 1.4 Hierarchy and Demarcation; 1.5 What's Wrong with Quantum Mechanics?; 1.6 Was Chemistry More Scientific than Physics (1865-1980)? Mendeleev's Periodic Law; 1.7 Scientific Chemists: Benzene and Molecular Orbitals.

1.8 The Unscientific (But Very Successful) Method of Dirac and Einstein: Can We Trust Experiments to Test Theories?1.9 Why was Bibhas De's paper rejected by Icarus?; 1.10 The Plurality of Scientific Methods; 2 Reception Studies by Historians of Science; 2.1 What is Reception?; 2.2 The Copernican Heliocentric System; 2.3 Newton's Universal Gravity; 2.4 Darwin's Theory of Evolution by Natural Selection; 2.5 Bohr Model of the Atom; 2.6 Conclusions and Generalizations; 3 Prediction-Testing in the Evaluation of Theories: A Controversy in the Philosophy of Science; 3.1 Introduction.

3.2 Novelty in the Philosophy of Science3.3 What is a Prediction? (Revisited); 3.4 Doe…