Black Mischief
Language, Life, Logic, Luck (Second Edition)
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
From the Preface to the Second Edition:
“This book will not take the casual reader to the cutting edge of research. Nor is it meant to. What I am after in Black Mischief is the moment in which various lines in an intellectual field of force collect themselves into a kind of dense knot…A number of otherwise sympathetic reviewers have suggested that my aim in Black Mischief was somehow to show the persistence of certain outmoded Newtonian forms of thought in economics, or psychology, or biology, or wherever. Not so. My intention has been to explore a tangle of connected concepts.”
Black Mischief is the cogent and absorbing story of an unusually fertile period in the contemporary science. Irreverent, witty, skeptical, and always informative, it is an anecdotal potpourri of scientific thought and the people who shaped it. Berlinski takes a protean look at the science establishment – as well as the personalities behind the scenes – in such fields as behavioral psychology, linguistics, and economics, and in so doing enlightens and entertains us beyond measure.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Berlinski (author of the notable On Systems Analysis has saturated himself in advanced mathematics, analytical philosophy and, to some degree, modern linguistics. Here he swarms over the reader from each of these directions, describing in amusing-to-ribald fashion his experiences in labs and at seminars with famed scientists in San Francisco, Paris, Vienna, Trieste and elsewhere. His theme: that contemporary science, with its almost-daily discoveries and apparent marvels, seems firmly oriented toward the future, but underlying its key assumptions is a "system of belief'' still tied to 19th century mechanistic determinism despite the innovations of Einstein, quantum mechanics, Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle and molecular biology. Berlinski's intellectual roller-coaster comes at last to the notion of randomness, and in brilliant but dizzying final chapters that discuss DNA, catastrophe theory, metric space and ``life as a language-like system,'' he seems to arrive at a nonmystical vitalism that may well bring his peers to their feetcheering or protesting.
