Muddling Through: Pursuing Science and Truth in the Twenty-first Century

Messy. Clumsy. Volatile. Exciting. These words are not often associated with the sciences, which for most people still connote exactitude, elegance, reliability, and a rather plodding certainty. But the real story is something quite different.

The sciences are less about the ability to know and to control than they are about the unleashing of new forces, new capacities for changing the world. The sciences as practiced exist not in some pristine world of “objectivity,” but in what Mike Fortun...