IN JANUARY 1998, about halfway through my first year out of graduate school, where I'd just completed a PhD in engineering, my housemate handed me a copy of New Scientist containing a book review by the physicist and science writer, John Gribbin. The book was Tricks of the Trade by Chicago sociologist, Howard Becker, mostly a collection of Becker's musings on how to do productive social science research. Gribbin clearly hated it, judging Becker's insights to be the kind of self-evident checks that "real scientists learn in the cradle". But Gribbin didn't stop there, noting that the book had merely reinforced his opinion that all social science was "something of an oxymoron" and that "any physicist threatened by cuts in funding ought to consider a career in the social sciences, where it ought to be possible to solve the problems the social scientists are worked up about in a trice".
展开▼
