Historians, sociologists and philosophers of science have often delved into the question of how and why some theories become scientific knowledge. From demarcationist realism to relativist socio-constructivism, the number of potential answers to this central question has multiplied throughout the twentieth century in the academic literature. The most popular and influential stance among scientists and the general public, according to Stephen G. Brush, is experimental predictivism and, more specifically, Karl Popper's falsifiability. This is a book against it.

Building on his expertise in the history of physics, Brush presents the reader with a highly documented history of the traditional paradigm shifts in physics (namely relativity, quantum mechanics and cosmology), some episodes in the history of chemistry (the invention of the periodic table and the structure of benzene) and the neo-Darwinian revolution. While there is not much in terms of new historical data, the narrative of the whole book is geared towards showing that the experimental confirmation of testable predictions or retrodictions of the new theories is only a minor element in the process of accepting them as valid scientific knowledge. To the question ‘how are new scientific theories accepted?’ the reader is left with an answer that may be agreeable to the historian but not to many philosophers: that there are many elements in such reception processes from aesthetic and social factors to explanatory power and predicting success. The last sentence in the book is perhaps a good summary of Brush's intention in this work: ‘Any statement to the effect that scientists follow a single method based on proposing hypotheses and testing predictions-in-advance is refuted by the most important revolution of twentieth-century physics’, i.e. the quantum and relativity revolutions (p. 496).

Making 20th Century Science is organized in four parts. The first, ‘The reception and evaluation of theories in the sciences’, tries to set the stage of what is to come by locating this work in the broader context of ‘reception studies’. The aim is to study not so much the way new theories were formed but how and why they were accepted in the scientific community. Thus reception is here not so much the circulation, adaptation and transformation of knowledge in local contexts but the responses in a take-or-leave scenario in the face of already formulated new theories. Lest the reader be misled by the term ‘reception’, the fourth chapter, ‘The rise and fall of social constructivism, 1975–2000’, makes it clear that ‘reception’ in this book is not related to any form of social constructivism, which the author regards as a no longer fashionable academic trend now (fortunately for him) dead and buried. This chapter may look at first glance like an unnecessary addition, perhaps as the settling of scores against a school with which the author is clearly not sympathetic, but I think it plays a balancing role for the narrative of the book after three chapters criticizing all forms of experimental predictivism as the only source to accept or legitimize scientific theories.

The rest of the book is divided into three parts where all the above-mentioned case studies are discussed. One of the elements worth highlighting in these narratives is the importance the author gives to textbooks as historical sources to study the reception of new theories. Praiseworthy as that is, the book does not show much in terms of intricate analysis of what counts as a scientific textbook when it comes to introducing new knowledge and what kind of information they can provide. The choice of the case studies also begs for some explanation. Clearly the author is building on his own expertise as a historian of physics, but the philosophical generalizations he is trying to put forward require, from my point of view, a more nuanced justification of why they are relevant, especially when, after introducing two case studies from chemistry and one from biology, the concluding chapter only refers to the physics chapters.

The core thesis of the book is certainly interesting and relevant to historians and scientists, although perhaps less novel than the author claims in the first chapters. The book would, however, have benefited from further elaboration to avoid many repetitions and bold statements without much justification, like his distinction between physics and chemistry insofar as the influence of experimental results is concerned in accepting new theories. Based on just two examples this is a rather risky generalization. Finally, I am not particularly keen on the way endnotes are added at the end of each chapter: the main text makes no reference to the existence of such endnotes and it is up to the reader to guess which aspects are expanded at the end of the chapter.