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"Riveting… Strevens promises his readers a better explanation of scientific progress than those given by his two illustrious predecessors, Karl Popper and Thomas Kuhn…[He] sustains his polemical fireworks with a steady succession of examples drawn from the history of science…Worth reading for the quality of Mr. Strevens’s prose alone, his crystal-clear, unfussy sentences, the crisp metaphors(comparing, say, an electron’s complex “superposition” in quantum mechanics to a cocktail mixed from many ingredients) and many excellent quips… As a hard-nosed, wonderfully timely plea for taking science seriously, for allowing scientists to do their work without interference, The Knowledge Machine is unparalleled."
― Christoph Irmscher, Wall Street Journal

"A provocative and fascinating book.... Strevens’s book contains a number of surprises, including an elegant section on quantum mechanics that coolly demonstrates why it’s such an effective theory.... Ambitious.... Strevens builds on the work of philosophers like Karl Popper and Thomas Kuhn to come up with his own original hypothesis about the advent of modern science and its formidable consequences."
― Jennifer Szalai, New York Times

"Strevens shows scientists exerting themselves intellectually.... [and] aims to identify that special something."
― Joshua Rothman, The New Yorker

"One of the better examinations of the origins of the scientific revolution."
― Kirkus Reviews

"[Strevens], an NYU philosophy professor, takes a scholarly look at how modern science arose with this erudite study. . . . For readers curious about why science works as well as it does, Strevens provides a convincing answer."
― Publishers Weekly

Chapter Page
Introduction: The Knowledge Machine 1
I The Great Method Debate
1. Unearthing the Scientific Method 13
2. Human Frailty 41
3. The Essential Subjectivity of Science 66
II How Science Works
4. The Iron Rule of Explanation 89
5. Baconian Convergence 105
6. Explanatory Ore 120
7. The Drive for Objectivity 152
8. The Supremacy of Observation 173
III Why Science Took So Long
9. Science's Strategic Irrationality 201
10. The War against Beauty 209
11. The Advent of Science 239
IV Science Now
12. Building the Scientific Mind 255
13. Science and Humanism 269
14. Care and Maintenance of the Knowledge Machine 278
Acknowledgments 291
Glossary of Novel Terms 293
Notes 295
References 321
List of Illustrations 331
Index 335

“The Knowledge Machine is the most stunningly illuminating book of the last several decades regarding the all-important scientific enterprise.” ―Rebecca Newberger Goldstein, author of Plato at the Googleplex

A paradigm-shifting work, The Knowledge Machine revolutionizes our understanding of the origins and structure of science.

? Why is science so powerful?
? Why did it take so long―two thousand years after the invention of philosophy and mathematics―for the human race to start using science to learn the secrets of the universe?

In a groundbreaking work that blends science, philosophy, and history, leading philosopher of science Michael Strevens answers these challenging questions, showing how science came about only once thinkers stumbled upon the astonishing idea that scientific breakthroughs could be accomplished by breaking the rules of logical argument.

Like such classic works as Karl Popper’s The Logic of Scientific Discovery and Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, The Knowledge Machine grapples with the meaning and origins of science, using a plethora of vivid historical examples to demonstrate that scientists willfully ignore religion, theoretical beauty, and even philosophy to embrace a constricted code of argument whose very narrowness channels unprecedented energy into empirical observation and experimentation. Strevens calls this scientific code the iron rule of explanation, and reveals the way in which the rule, precisely because it is unreasonably close-minded, overcomes individual prejudices to lead humanity inexorably toward the secrets of nature.

“With a mixture of philosophical and historical argument, and written in an engrossing style” (Alan Ryan), The Knowledge Machine provides captivating portraits of some of the greatest luminaries in science’s history, including Isaac Newton, the chief architect of modern science and its foundational theories of motion and gravitation; William Whewell, perhaps the greatest philosopher-scientist of the early nineteenth century; and Murray Gell-Mann, discoverer of the quark. Today, Strevens argues, in the face of threats from a changing climate and global pandemics, the idiosyncratic but highly effective scientific knowledge machine must be protected from politicians, commercial interests, and even scientists themselves who seek to open it up, to make it less narrow and more rational―and thus to undermine its devotedly empirical search for truth.

Rich with illuminating and often delightfully quirky illustrations, The Knowledge Machine, written in a winningly accessible style that belies the import of its revisionist and groundbreaking concepts, radically reframes much of what we thought we knew about the origins of the modern world.

53 black-and-white illustrations