Content: PREFACE ix PROLOGUE What Is Science? 3 PART I. EXPLORING THE FRONTIERS OF SCIENCE: HOW NEW DISCOVERIES ARE MADE IN THE SCIENCES 9 CHAPTER 1 A Bird's Eye View: The Many Routes to Scientific Discovery 11 CHAPTER 2 Nature's jigsaw: Looking for Patterns As a Key to Discovery 26 CHAPTER 3 New Vistas: Expanding Our World with Instrumentation 35 CHAPTER 4 Close, But No Cigar: Discrepancies As a Trigger to Discovery 42 CHAPTER 5 Ingredients for a Revolution: Thematic Imagination, Precise Measurements, and the Motions of the Planets 52 PART II. MENTAL TACTICS: SOME DISTINCTIVELY SCIENTIFIC APPROACHES TO THE WORLD 67 CHAPTER 6 A Universe in a Bottle: Models, Modeling, and Successive Approximation 69 CHAPTER 7 Thinking Straight: Evidence, Reason, and Critical Evaluation 89 CHAPTER 8 The Numbers Game: Uses of Quantitative Reasoning 107 PART III. LARGER QUESTIONS: THE CONTEXT OF SCIENCE 123 CHAPTER 9 Ultimate Questions: Science and Religion 125 CHAPTER 10 More Practical Questions: Science and Society 133 CHAPTER 11 Difficult and Important Questions: Science, Values, and Ethics 145 CHAPTER 12 Questions of Authenticity: Science, Pseudoscience, and How to Tell the Difference 158 CHAPTER 13 Contentious Questions: The Shadowy Borderlands of Science 174 CHAPTER 14 Very Abstract Questions: The Philosophy of Science 189 CHAPTER 15 Questions of Legitimacy: The Postmodern Critique of Science 207 PART IV COMMON GROUND: SOME UNIFYING CONCEPTS IN THE SCIENCES 215 CHAPTER 16 Fleas and Giants: Some Fascinating Insights about Area, Volume, and Size 217 CHAPTER 17 The Edge of the Abyss: Order and Disorder in the Universe 230 CHAPTER 18 Riding Blake's Tiger: Symmetry in Science, Art, and Mathematics 252 CHAPTER 19 The Straight and Narrow: Linear Dependence in the Sciences 274 CHAPTER 20 The Limits of the Possible: Exponential Growth and Decay 285 CHAPTER 21 In the Loop: Feedback, Homeostasis, and Cybernetics 295 EPILOGUE So, What Is Science? 303 INDEX 305