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What is it for 科学究竟有什么用 Scinece in the 20th century and beyond; by JonAgar; 20世纪后科学;乔艾格著; SCIENCE works with problems by making them into manageable, manipulableabstractions. Jon Agar s ambitious new book sets out to synthesise the insights of manyrecent historians of science. These might be anything from a field biologist s notes of lemmingpopulations on Spitzbergen to a physicist s creation of muon tracks in a cloud chamber, orfrom a set of equations in the mathematical imagination to a vast computer model of theworld s climate. 用科学的方法处理问题就是将这些问题转化成易管理且可操作的抽象概念。乔艾格将近代众多科学史家的见解都融入在他的新作当中，真可谓是大胆的创作。在这本书中你将会看到野外生物学家对于斯匹茨卑根群岛上的旅鼠种群的阐述，物理学家在云室里创建的介子轨迹，利用数学概念思考出的一组方程式，以及巨型计算机模型中的全球气候。 Doing science is making these abstractions. The history of science is understanding howparticular abstractions come to be accepted as the right way of producing solutionsandhow problems get chosen in the first place. Sometimes the problems are those of the peoplepaying for the science; sometimes they are posed by developments the scientists areinterested in; sometimes they are problems that grow out of science itself. | 
