Science and cultural crisis : an intellectual biography of Percy Williams Bridgman (1882-1961) /

Bridgman was a Harvard physicist who made his scientific reputation pioneering the study of materials subjected to extremely high pressures. A New Englander by birth and a Platonist of sorts by temperament, he saw scientific truth as a shining palace toward which one climbs by efforts of experiment, intuition, and a little calculation. In the middle of Bridgman's studies, Einstein's relativity theory arrived like a thunderstorm: counterintuitive and, for those days, densely mathematical, but supported by most of the existing experimental data. Bridgman discovered that he could no longer explain to himself what science is about or what he was doing; the situation only got worse 20 years later when quantum mechanics arrived. (For an account of a very different mind caught in the same dilemma, see Russell McCormmach's Night Thoughts of a Classical Physicist, CH, Jun'82.) Over the next 30 years, Bridgman, untrained in philosophy, wrote books and articles that tried to formulate a philosophy of science that was in accordance with his ideal of a thinking human being. Walter's immense knowledge and dialectic skill leave few of Bridgman's ideas standing among the ruins, but she makes a splendid portrait of a man trying to preserve his integrity in an era of transition in US science. Recommended for advanced undergraduates and up. -D. Park, Williams College