The Knowledge Machine: How Irrationality Created Modern Science
Liveright, October 2020
During the seventeenth-century Scientific Revolution, a small handful of radical thinkers, among them Francis Bacon and Isaac Newton, hit upon a way of investigating the mysteries of the natural world – the motions of the planets, the behavior of gases, the inner springs of the human body – that would come to reveal the underlying principles that govern matter and mind. The Knowledge Machine asks what these thinkers, the first modern scientists, did differently, and why their innovations came so late in the course of human history. Challenging the conventional regard for science as a paragon of logic, The Knowledge Machine demonstrates that the invention of modern science required not more but less rationality. By willfully ignoring religion, aesthetic beauty, and especially philosophy, scientists embraced an unreasonably narrow method of inquiry, whose very narrowness channeled unprecedented energy into observation and experiment. The same force has driven the success of science ever since.
Liveright/W W Norton web page for the The Knowledge Machine
What It's About
Keep science irrational (at Aeon; a preview of the core idea of The Knowledge Machine)
Why Aristotle didn't invent modern science, at Big Think—an even shorter preview of the core idea
Reviews
New Yorker review of The Knowledge Machine
New York Times review of The Knowledge Machine
Wall Street Journal review of The Knowledge Machine
Guardian review of The Knowledge Machine
Science review of The Knowledge Machine
Psychology Today review of The Knowledge Machine
Podcasts etc.
With Ricardo Lopes at The Dissenter
With Ben Reinhardt at Idea Machines
And many more…
Talks
The highly effective irrationality of science, at the Brooklyn Public Library
Talk at the Royal Institution on some ideas in The Knowledge Machine
And a few more, posted here and there
Performance Art
The Playbook Versus the Knowledge Machine
Related Papers
Science Is Irrational—and a Good Thing, Too. To appear in Extreme Philosophy, Routledge, edited by Stephen Hetherington