THE SCIENCE OF SCIENCE

Three research directors of the Westinghouse corporation have put together an unusually interesting book that presents cogently the physical and mathematical factors empirical science must be concerned with when it seeks to describe or measure as accurately as possible the world around us. They explain with care the technical and theoretical ways we can extend our senses to measure distances (the smallest), pressure, sound, flavor, and physical order. Some of the fundamental aspects of physics are focused in ways that should be very useful in the high school classroom where there is a serious interest in the tools of science. Some of these are the limits of observation, Brownian movement, the nature of noise, the meaning of uncertainty, the constants of physics, and many others. There is even a brief review of calculus in this patient exploration and survey of the boundaries and possibilities of measurement.