Black Mischief Language, Life, Logic, Luck (Second Edition)

Cover; Title Page; Copyright; Dedication; Contents; Acknowledgements; Preface; PART I; True Confessions; Getting Rich; The Dismal Science; Losing Money; The Axis of Desire and Belief; A Prince of the Realm; Hot Air Rising; Taking Stock; Bi-Coastal: East; Whatever It's Worth; The Boys in the Back Room; Physical, Material, Mechanical; Bi-Coastal: West; The Odds; Russian Roulette; A Farewell to Physics; From Bad to Worse; Information; My Sign; Kolmogorov Complexity; Paris; PART II; As Big as Galileo; Status in Science; Dim Sum; The Gnome; Knowing and Known; Harvard; The Scientific Method.;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. Cover Title Page Copyright Dedication Contents Acknowledgements Preface PART I True Confessions Getting Rich The Dismal Science Losing Money The Axis of Desire and Belief A Prince of the Realm Hot Air Rising Taking Stock Bi-Coastal: East Whatever It's Worth The Boys in the Back Room Physical, Material, Mechanical Bi-Coastal: West The Odds Russian Roulette A Farewell to Physics From Bad to Worse Information My Sign Kolmogorov Complexity Paris PART II As Big as Galileo Status in Science Dim Sum The Gnome Knowing and Known Harvard The Scientific Method. Laws of PsychologyDouble Trouble Darwinian Days Force Majeure Making Out Can We Talk? Give Baby the Orange Chomsky Ascendant Loitering at Infinity Under the Aspect of Syntax Sour Grapes Sunny Days at Stanford Wordsmith Sentences from Symbols Contra Force Majeure Nous Sommes Si Beaux Two Great Frauds PART III Formal Systems The Hilbert Program Brunch The Connoisseur of Complexity Fillmore Street Truth, Theories, Models Symbol to Symbol The Range of Light The Ghost within the Machine An Attitude Adjustment The Machine within the Ghost Blind Ambition Late Lunches. Sermon for the DayPART IV Alpine Weather Newton's Version On the Arm The Vagaries of Curvature Launched Zusammenhang A Mozart of Management Celestial Dynamics Happy Days at HRA Newton's Vision Just Like That The Right Stuff Differential Topology The Triple Concepts Mighty Morse Thom's Way Out Stable Shapes The Long Goodbye Owing to Whitney Classification and Its Discontents Centro di Physica PART V Doctor No A System of Belief Scopes Two Employed Again Haunting History Cashing In Misprints in the Book of Life Life Itself An Experiment in Education The Team. PlenitudeGood as Gould Ovid in His Exile George The Evidence for Evolution Checking Out The Spaces of Life A Little Number on Complexity The Language of Life Weak Theories Language-Like In the Sixteenth Arrondissement Arguments Gone Bad Meaning Pedagogical Impact There to Here The Weizenbaum Experiment Eigen-values of Natural Selection Florence. 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...