The Scientific Sublime
Popular Science Unravels the Mysteries of the Universe
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- $30.99
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- $30.99
Publisher Description
The sublime evokes our awe, our terror, and our wonder. Applied first in ancient Greece to the heights of literary expression, in the 18th-century the sublime was extended to nature and to the sciences, enterprises that viewed the natural world as a manifestation of God's goodness, power, and wisdom.
In The Scientific Sublime, Alan Gross reveals the modern-day sublime in popular science. He shows how the great popular scientists of our time--Richard Feynman, Stephen Hawking, Steven Weinberg, Brian Greene, Lisa Randall, Rachel Carson, Stephen Jay Gould, Steven Pinker, Richard Dawkins, and E. O. Wilson--evoke the sublime in response to fundamental questions: How did the universe begin? How did life? How did language? These authors maintain a tradition initiated by Joseph Addison, Edmund Burke, Immanuel Kant, and Adam Smith, towering 18th-century figures who adapted the literary sublime first to nature, then to science--though with one crucial difference: religion has been replaced wholly by science.
In a final chapter, Gross explores science's attack on religion, an assault that attempts to sweep permanently under the rug two questions science cannot answer: What is the meaning of life? What is the meaning of the good life?
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Gross (The Rhetoric of Science), a University of Minnesota Twin Cities professor emeritus of communication studies, tackles the question of how successful popular science writers transmit complex ideas to a general audience, but his own work lacks a self-evident audience among either professional or lay readers. For examples, Gross chooses the writings of five physicists, Richard Feynman, Brian Greene, Stephen Hawking, Lisa Randall, and Steven Weinberg, and of five scientists involved with evolutionary theory, Rachel Carson, Richard Dawkins, Stephen Jay Gould, Steven Pinker, and E.O. Wilson. Unfortunately, Gross doesn't have the knack for clearly and simply summarizing thorny concepts that he attributes to his subjects, so their ideas become ever more abstruse as he attempts to discuss them. Although mostly adulatory, he does takes aim at Pinker's hypotheses, but with abbreviated and generally unconvincing criticisms, such as that Pinker's statistical argument for the historical decline of violence excludes automotive deaths. He concludes with an out-of-place chapter arguing that those who conclude that science must replace God are mistaken, an argument perhaps germane to Dawkins but less so to the other writers discussed. This frustrating book does little to advance the understanding of the nature of science or of science writing.
