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| Preface | |
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| Prologue: What Is Science? | |
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| Exploring the Frontiers of Science: How New Discoveries are Made in the Sciences | |
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| A Bird's Eye View: The Many Routes to Scientific Discovery | |
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| Nature's Jigsaw: Looking for Patterns As a Key to Discovery | |
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| New Vistas: Expanding Our World with Instrumentation | |
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| Close, But No Cigar: Discrepancies As a Trigger to Discovery | |
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| Ingredients for a Revolution: Thematic Imagination, Precise Measurements, and the Motions of the Planets | |
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| Mental Tactics: Some Distinctively Scientific Approaches to the World | |
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| A Universe in a Bottle: Models, Modeling, and Successive Approximation | |
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| Thinking Straight: Evidence, Reason, and Critical Evaluation | |
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| The Numbers Game: Uses of Quantitative Reasoning | |
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| Larger Questions: the Context of Science | |
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| Ultimate Questions: Science and Religion | |
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| More Practical Questions: Science and Society | |
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| Difficult and Important Questions: Science, Values, and Ethics | |
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| Questions of Authenticity: Science, Pseudoscience, and How to Tell the Difference | |
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| Contentious Questions: The Shadowy Borderlands of Science | |
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| Very Abstract Questions: The Philosophy of Science | |
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| Questions of Legitimacy: The Postmodern Critique of Science | |
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| Common Ground: Some Unifying Concepts in the Sciences | |
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| Fleas and Giants: Some Fascinating Insights about Area, Volume, and Size | |
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| The Edge of the Abyss: Order and Disorder in the Universe | |
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| Riding Blake's Tiger: Symmetry in Science, Art, and Mathematics | |
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| The Straight and Narrow: Linear Dependence in the Sciences | |
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| The Limits of the Possible: Exponential Growth and Decay | |
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| In the Loop: Feedback, Homeostasis, and Cybernetics | |
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| Epilogue: So, What Is Science? | |
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| Index | |