This book introduces and develops an integrated view of science as a varied human activity rather than an abstract intellectual process, asking significant questions about the nature and limits of scientific knowledge. The author uses a technique of "cognitive play," which creates and explores new links between the ideas and results of contemporary history, philosophy and sociology of science. New ideas and approaches are applied to a wide range of case studies, many of them from controversial and contested science. Historians and sociologists of science, and anyone interested in the history,...