Inventing Temperature by Hasok Chang

I have never taken interest in Physics and it always has been a foreign area to me. So it was quite enlightening for me to learn about the history and philosophy of science through this book, an area previously unknown to me.

The book opens with the discussion of how reliable our senses are as the prime instrument of observation. The most commonly used example that physicists and philosophers use is the colored lenses. If we were looking though a red lens, the world would look red to us, and through a blue lens, blue. According to this logic, our senses (especially the visual sense) are not the most reliable tool when it comes to making an absolute scientific observation. Since we cannot determine the verity of a phenomena using our senses, we make a justification based on our logic. While trying to digest this, "justification" seemed very complex all of a sudden and I began to wonder how people began verbalizing this epistemological concept. Chang states that because we cannot determine absolute truth for certain, the initial justification is made, and upon that justification we link various empirical observations in order to arrive at a scientific theory. There is an interplay of concretization - operationalization - conceptualization behind theorizing in science - especially Physics. It makes clear sense because Physics was originally an area of Philosophy and almost all of the early scientists were philosophers.

The key idea that Chang discusses in this book is thermometry: heat measurement. When the human kind first conceived of different degrees of heat (i.e. the water here is warmer than the water there), the initial standard of measurement of course was our tactile senses. Then setting a universal standard and having something to compare seemed to be the next inevitable step in thermometry. A few interesting objections were raised in the history of thermometry and the most memorable one for me was the argument that when something is cold, there is an abundance of "cold" as opposed to absence was "heat." This assertion is clearly plausible (though various experiments later confirmed the presence of heat/infrared ray) and it is from this skepticism the calorific/frigorific argument was developed.

So many scientific theories have now been conceptualized and applied since these early trials and errors in thermometry. Nowadays, few would categorize science as an area of philosophy. Rather, science is conceived as an area of knowledge which deals with objective, universal information. Moreover, no longer do we doubt and challenge science; we take science for granted and even accept it without fully understanding a lot of its content. Although both currently-existing and new discoveries in science are overwhelming and extremely difficult to keep up with, it is through the study of History and Philosophy of Science that we learn that skepticism increases the quality of knowledge, if not quantity.