Steven Shapin's The Scientific Revolution

The Scientific Revolution

For my book review, I have read and evaluated Steven Shapin’s popular book entitled

The Scientific Revolution published in 1996. This book was approximately two hundred pages mostly illustrating a series of changes in scientific practice involving the way scientists develop specific works and theories. The following review of Steven Shapin’s work will include a summary of the book’s content along with a description of its major strengths and weaknesses.

Shapin challenges the twentieth-century historiography that somewhat came up with the idea of the Scientific Revolution; however, he doesn’t hesitate to acknowledge the remarkable scientific activity occurring throughout this time period. This book makes it easy to

Mistakes are made and something can easily go wrong if one looks at a fellow scientist’s report and misreads the information. Shapin examined and observed what people did when studying science to better his interpretations of it.

In Shapin’s third and final chapter, he focuses on the new science and what people hoped to get out of it. This part of his writing talks about religion and the effect it had during both the current and previous situations in the world. Also, he stresses the overview of the social and political uses of science. As humans, we like to make up ideas about history, ultimately passing down information that is false. After reading all three sections, I believe that there was indeed such thing as The Scientific Revolution. Shapin explains how scientific critics might as well be scientists and would do a better job than philosophers or historians. Although Shapin disagrees that science is described in any other way than his own, he defines science as “certainly the most reliable body of natural knowledge we have got” (165), and he still believes this even if

The Scientific Revolution is portrayed in a way of understanding the drastic events that have shaped the modern world and how we view it today. The structure of scientific knowledge is believed to be the process which is socially driven; however, Shapin expresses that it is historically impacted. His way of interpreting The Scientific Revolution is by taking ideas of early philosophers and combining them to make a greater impact physically, socially, and mentally. Shapin uses a determined and straight-forward tone throughout the story in order to gain an awareness of the connections between the past to our present-day society. I feel as if his tone made it easy to understand the drastic changes and events during this time, although, it was difficult to understand how Shapin was thinking and I believe it could be more structured and organized. Shapin stresses the new ideas in science and goes more in depth with the context, yet, he also spends time to discuss what people did to practice science and how they came up with the idea of The Scientific Revolution. Not only does Shapin help readers understand his beliefs