I received yet another popular science book to review (for Significance), When the Earth was flat by Graeme Donald. The subtitle is “All the bits of Science we got wrong”, which is both very ambitious (“All”, really?!) and modest (in that most scientific theories are approximations waiting to be invalidated and improved by the next theory). (I wrote this review during my trip in Gainesville, maybe too quickly!)
The themes processed and debunked in this book are wide-ranging. In fact they do not necessarily fall under my definition of science. They often are related to commercial swindles and political agendas loosely based on plainly wrong scientific theories. The book is thus more about the uses of (poor) science than about Science itself. Continue reading
