Interesting, but repetitious. It really should have been just a long essay. ( )

Good approach to science and learning, probably too short. With the addition of a few organizational business cases it would have been a really great book. ( )

Really loved it - a wonderful book about science and the process of discovery. Well written, funny, and short. My kind of book! ( )

Excellent! I thoroughly enjoyed reading this book - both how it was written and the content. Reading this has refreshed the love and excitement I have for my own scientific career.
Ignorance is indeed what drives science, and we all need to be more comfortable, and heck, excited when the answer is 'we do not know'. ( )

There's a popular conception of science and scientists that drives me absolutely crazy. It's one that looks on science as a supposed collection of hard, irrefutable Established Facts, and scientists as rigid, closed-minded sorts who care only about being able to say "Yes, yes, we have explained that," and who will deny the existence of anything they haven't already explained even when it's staring them plainly in the face. And it drives me crazy because it's absolutely, 100% the opposite of the truth. It's clear that anyone who buys into it, even the slightest bit, never heard an actual scientist talking about, say, the Pioneer Anomaly, in which the far-flung Pioneer space probes departed from their expected trajectories in a way that no one initially knew how to explain. Some of these scientists got positively giddy at the fantastically unlikely but nevertheless real possibility that this wasn't due to some overlooked but utterly mundane issue with the spacecraft themselves, but that it might, just possibly, represent some area where our current understanding of physics breaks down. (Sadly, in this case, the answer did ultimately turn out to be less exciting than that.)

Stuart Firestein doesn't talk about the Pioneer Anomaly in this short book, but he's making very much the point that I think those giddy physicists were demonstrating. The excitement of science, he says, and the key to its advancement, lies not in tidily accumulated lists of Facts That Are Known, but in identifying the areas of our ignorance and groping our way into them to try to figure out what might or, just as importantly, might not be concealed there. And this is a process that involves not so much finding the right answers, but asking the right questions, and, in some cases, in questioning even the things we think we already know.

The book itself is pretty slight, and for anyone who already understands this point, I don't think there's going to be a whole lot here that's new. And the half of the book that he spends on "case histories" -- that is, on looking at a few particular scientists and their perspectives on the unanswered questions in their fields, as well as on his own history of research and exploration -- was not nearly as interesting to me as I had expected it to be, although that may have to do with the fact that a fair amount of it wasn't new to me, either. But the basic point he's making is deeply important, and he formulates it clearly and well, in a way that's aimed at an audience of non-scientists, and there are a lot of people out there I can only wish would read it. ( )