The Invisible Century
Einstein, Freud and the Search for Hidden Universes (Text Only)
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- 9,49 €
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- 9,49 €
Publisher Description
A book which offers fresh perspectives on the scientific developments of the past hundred years through the complementary work of two of the century’s greatest thinkers, Einstein and Freud.
At the turn of the century there was a widespread assumption in scientific circles that the pursuit of knowledge was nearing its end and that all available evidence had been exhausted. However, by 1916 both Einstein and Freud had exploded the myth by leading exploration into the science of the invisible and the unconscious. These men were more than just contemporaries – their separate pursuits were in fact complementary. Freud’s science of psychoanalysis found its cosmological counterpart in the Astronomy of Invisible Light pioneered by Einstein. Together they questioned the little inconsistencies of Newton’s ordered cosmos to reveal a different reality, a natural order that was anything but ordered, a cosmos that was volatile and vast – an organism alive in time. These men inspired a fundamental shift in the history of human thought. They began a revolution that is still in progress and provided one of the past century’s greatest contributions to the history of science.
Reviews
‘Fascinating. Panek’s presentation is masterly.’ New York Times
‘Read this book. From it you can learn a great deal not just about how science works, or how scientists think, but also about how they define the science they do.’ Guardian
‘Positively humming with intellectual excitement.’ Financial Times
About the author
Richard Panek has written for The New York Times Magazine, Outside, Esquire and the Chicago Tribune, and is a contributing writer at Elle and Mirabella. He is the winner of a PEN award for short fiction (which has been broadcast on National Public Radio). He is also the author of Waterloo Diamonds, a social history of an Iowa community told through its baseball fortunes.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Veteran science writer Panek's pairing of the dual icons Einstein and Freud, whose labors were in widely disparate fields, is both natural and inspired. He uses his formidable writing skills to illuminate two of the 20th century's most notable accomplishments, the theory of general relativity and the discovery of the unconscious, weaving them into an informative and interesting history of the scientific method. Panek's explanation of Einstein's theory of relativity is excellent, and readers will with pleasure understand this counterintuitive concept. He is equally good at describing how Freud developed his theory of the unconscious. Panek also describes how the two rejected the 19th-century scientific paradigm, which held that the more accurate measurement of physical aspects of the universe would unravel its secrets. As Panek (Seeing and Believing) states, "...Einstein and Freud wound up venturing where their contemporaries did not because at a certain point, they didn't investigate. They thought. They reconceived the problem." Besides providing valuable biographical detail about both Freud and Einstein, Panek demonstrates a wide-ranging knowledge of the development of scientific thought and philosophy, as well as the major developments in both cosmology and the study of human anatomy. There is a remarkable amount of information in this short book, and Panek's valuable thesis that the triumph of 20th-century science was the discovery of the invisible workings of the universe and ourselves is well made.