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Mathematics: The Loss of Certainty by Morris Kline (review)
- Leonardo
- The MIT Press
- Volume 16, Number 4, Autumn 1983
- p. 328
- Review
- Additional Information
328 Books The author reminds us that the public "is the bus driver who takes the young scientist home at the end of his laboratory slog, the lady who takes care of his laboratory animals, the man who sells him his lunchtime sandwich ... most importantly, the public are those whose science teachers are the media." Goodfield examines the roles of communicators from the printed and televised media and of researchers. She takes as examples the memorable case of Summerlin's painted mouse at Memorial SloanKettering Institute, the 1975 Asilomar conference on the ethical inhibitions related to DNA research, the publication by Lippincott of David Rorvik's book on the cloning of an unidentified boy, and the deontological-legal involvement of London's The Sunday Times in the western European thalidomide scandal during the 1960s and 1970s. The author chronicles these in admirably summary form and finds the researchers involved guilty of half-truths or deceit in their relations with the public. Goodfield's analysis does not, however, make heroes of the media. She admonishes that, to improve communication about science, "at least some writers must become more like responsible political commentators, adding analysis, judgment and criticism to their reporting." To do this best, professional communicators and scientists need to elaborate together an effective modus vivendi because "maintaining a level of scientific literacy in the public is as difficult a task as doing science itself, and the media cannot do this alone." Currently adjunct professor at Cornell University Medical School, Goodfield has also written and directed scientific films. She shows an excellent grasp of multi-media impacts on the public when scientific or technical information is vernacularized and of the risks of interpretation. She asks if a report on science should be treated in the traditional Anglo-American fashion (who-what-when-where) of presenting news. How willing are editors or producers to lend continuity to coverage, from day to day or week to week, treating information as cultural process rather than ad hoc event? To what extent is the public itself willing to overcome its scientific illiteracy, and what efforts must researchers and communicators make towards this goal? Must they "trick" the public into "an unwary concession to some implausible assumption," as H. G. Wells counseled in his preface to a volume of novels in 1895, to get on with "the story while the illusion holds"? These are questions the popularizer must constantly review. This little book is well worth reading. AAAS's executive director, William D. Carey, writes in the preface to Goodfield's volume, "The point ofthe essay lies ... in what roads are open on which science and the media can journey ... glimpsing the changing face of science for a concerned and pre-occupied society." The zoologist-author has ably shown the way. Mathematics: The Loss of Certainty. Morris Kline. Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1982. 400 pp., illus. Paper, $7.95. ISBN: 0-19-503085-0. Reviewed by J. Guberman* Morris Kline is a well-known applied mathematician who worked on electromagnetic field theory in the 1940s and ' 50s. He has written several successful semi-popular books on the interpretation of scientific doctrines in terms of our understanding of the physical and conceptual worlds. Kline's encyclopedic history of mathematical thought (Mathematical Thoughtfrom Ancient to Modern Times, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1972) covered mathematical thinking from ancient to modern times. His current book examines what has been a problem in the conceptual foundations of mathematics for eighty years - " the loss of certainty". Kline poses the problem in a concise and readable form that appeals not only to those familiar with physics and mathematics, but to the intelligent layperson interested in the broad meaning of scientific discovery. The loss of certainty is one of the most important unsolved issues in logic and pure mathematics. Until the turn of the century, everybody believed (with one or two notable exceptions) that mathematics was a logically consistent formal system. Around the latter part of the nineteenth century, Georg Cantor, in his endeavour to make some branches of mathematics more rigorous, found that certain formal problems called into question mathematical reasoning in even the most accepted fields of mathematics, such as arithmetic. In...