The return to cosmology

"Can we rely on the discoveries that scientists make about one or another part, or aspect, of the world as a basis for drawing conclusions about the Universe as a Whole?" Thirty years ago, the separateness of different intellectual disciplines was an unquestioned axiom of intellectual procedure. By the mid-nineteen-seventies, however, even within the natural sciences proper, a shift from narrowly disciplinary preoccupations to more interdisciplinary issues had made it possible to reopen questions about the cosmological significance of the scientific world picture and scarcely possible any longer to rule out all religious cosmology as "unscientific." This book, the product of both a professional and a personal quest, follows the debate aobut cosmology - the theory of the Universe - as it has changed from 1945 to the present. The opening essay, "Scientific mythology" (1957), reflects the influence of Stephen Toulmin's postwar study with Ludwig Wittgenstein in its skepticism about the naive extrapolation of scientific concepts into nonscientific contexts. Skepticism gradually gives way to qualified optimism that there may be "still a real chance of working outward from the natural sciences into the larger cosmological realm" in a series of essays (1964-1980) on the cosmological specualtions of individual scientists, including Arthur Koestler, Jacques Monod, Carl Sagan, and others. In the programmatic concluding essay, Toulmin argues that the classic Newtonian distinction between the observer and the observed was inimical not only to the received religious cosmology but also to any attempt to understand humanity and nature as parts of a single cosmos. In the twentieth century, however, what he calls "the death of the spector" has forced the postmodern scientist - theoretically, in quantum physics, and practically, in the recognized impact of science-derived technologies on the environment - to include himself in his science. -- from dust cover.