About the Book

This is an outstanding book. It is among the very best science education books to be published in the past many decades. The subtitle of the book is: The Pleasure of Understanding’. Equally true, the ‘pleasure of reading’ will be experienced by all who turn its pages. Its historic and conceptual canvas is grand, from Aristotle to Aquinas, through Galileo, Descartes and Newton, to Einstein, Bohr and contemporary physicists. Each of the highlighted episodes in the contested history of science is painted in sufficient detail to absorb and satisfy all readers. Galili is a physicist with enviable competence and erudition in the history and philosophy of science. In each chapter, he demonstrates that the unfolding understanding of the physics – of free fall, of projectiles, of optics, of collisions, of dynamics – cannot be separated from the ontological and epistemological commitments of the investigating natural philosopher. Sometimes the commitments are explicit, other times implicit. Physics cannot be separated from philosophy: it both draws from philosophy and informs philosophy. Good teachers can draw out this interconnection.

Galili is also a physics educator who believes that the teaching of physics has tobe informed by the history and philosophy of science. Many educators share this commitment to the importance of HPS for ST. For Galili, this commitment is spelt out in detail across the widest range of pedagogical and curricular questions including, of course, elaboration of the nature of science or NOS. They are organized within a novel paradigm of the discipline-culture argued by the author as a fundamental tool of science education.

Galili is also a wonderful communicator. The book is richly illustrated with a hundred or more diagrams and illustrations, and scores of carefully selected pictures and portraits. There is an intrinsic linking of science with culture and art. Art historians will find many illuminating discussions in the book. For Galili, science itself is a culture and needs to be appreciated as such, specifically, as a discipline-culture.