Faculty Publications

Because brainwashing affects both the world and our observation of the world, we often don’t recognize it while it’s happening—unless we know where to look. As Rebecca Lemov writes in The Instability of Truth, “Brainwashing erases itself.” What we call...

In the early 20th century, business elites, trade associations, wealthy powerbrokers, and media allies set out to build a new American orthodoxy: down with “big government” and up with unfettered markets. With startling archival evidence, Oreskes and...

Observation is the most pervasive and fundamental practice of all the modern sciences, both natural and human. Its instruments include not only the naked senses but also tools such as the telescope and microscope, the questionnaire, the photographic plate...

What useful changes has feminism brought to science? Feminists have enjoyed success in their efforts to open many fields to women as participants. But the effects of feminism have not been restricted to altering employment and professional opportunities...

Physicists regularly invoke universal laws, such as those of motion and electromagnetism, to explain events. Biological and medical scientists have no such laws. How then do they acquire a reliable body of knowledge about biological organisms and human...

This volume addresses issues - the nature of truth, the conditions of objectivity, the sources of authority and the uses of evidence - which have been the focus of vigorous debate both within and beyond the historical profession in recent years. Avoiding...

New scientific ideas are subjected to an extensive process of evaluation and validation by the scientific community. Until the early 1980s, this process of validation was thought to be governed by objective criteria, whereas the process by which...

Through his rich exploration of Einstein’s thought, Gerald Holton shows how the best science depends on great intuitive leaps of imagination, and how science is indeed the creative expression of the traditions of Western civilization.

The highly acclaimed first edition of this major work convincingly established Gerald Holton’s analysis of the ways scientific ideas evolve. His concept of “themata,” induced from case studies with special attention to the work of Einstein, has become...