You see indications of the first everywhere, from newspaper reports on exciting new science results to school texts to the deliberations of funding bodies. The second is widely held among philosophers and is also endorsed by quite a few scientists, though it may not seem so much a part of the popular image of science. I think that with the exception of worries about how quantum theory fits in, the third is central to the popular image: it gives rise to all sorts of familiar conundrums about the possibility of free will, are criminals – or even saints – really responsible for their actions? Will the final theory of everything allow us to predict the future with certainty? But, as I’ll explain, it’s hard to see why you’d hold with (3) if you didn’t believe in (2), which is generally taken as the logical foundation for (3). That’s why I’ve included all three, putting them in this order.

A philosopher looks at science and what does she see? That science does not consist just of theory and experiment with a little window dressing added on. Rather, it consists of a whole Meccano set of scientific practices and products. And all the pieces matter. You can’t build a dam, design a social policy, measure temperature or justify a climate model with theory and experiment alone. You can’t even do any project purely in science itself without a good collection of other pieces to back you up. An experiment needs measurement techniques, not just for what is being experimented on but to get the arrangements right, as with temperature measurements to ensure the SQUID magnetometers used to measure the precession in the Gravity Probe B are able to function properly (recall that the temperature needs to be below a critical point for superconductivity). Measurement techniques need models and principles to show that they measure what they are supposed to. Principles involve concepts and concepts need stabilising and validating. And so on.

Though the point of this book is to look at science, this chapter is concerned with visions of nature. That’s hard to avoid since the two are so closely intertwined. Surely science tells us what nature is like, and equally what we think nature is like surely affects how we interpret the activities and the results of science. This chapter is about how we can construct images of nature that make sense given what we see when we look at science, especially at its many successes and how they are achieved, as well as its many failures.

The Nobel Prize in Physics 2020: Roger Penrose ‘for the discovery that black hole formation is a robust prediction of the general theory of relativity’, Reinhard Genzel and Andrea Ghez ‘for the discovery of a supermassive compact object at the centre of our galaxy’

Science has undoubtedly produced remarkable achievements from deep theories to technological devices to new ways to measure things. These achievements, I claim, are secured by a dense interwoven net of scientific constructions that constrain and support each other – the concurrent, mutually feeding back-and-forth development of ideas, concepts, theories, experiments, measures, middle-level principles, models, methods of inference, research traditions, data and narratives that make up a scientific endeavour, with rich interconnections with other bodies of work on very different topics that also constrain and support it.