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The book might also supply points of interest, although not always dependable instruction, to social scientists, philosophers, and psychologists. Thornton describes his book as a research memorandum "in keeping with the technicolour spirit of our times" and also owns to "importing various devices from the pop-science genre" (Preface, pp. His pop-science offerings include "light relief through a concoction of dialogues, anecdotes, and other forms of non-scientific material" (Preface, p. 2) of which the more historical chapters make the best reading. Here, departures from strict accuracy are offset by the liveliness of Thornton's accounts of Kepler's work (chapter 3) and Turing's part in breaking the German wartime Enigma code (chapter 6). He is less successful with Hume's demonstration of the fallibility of the inductive process. The old philosophical concern was that theories inductively inferred from sampled facts cannot be guaranteed true for every single future fact that might be ...