The Scientific Sublime: Popular Science Unravels the Mysteries of the Universe (Hardcover) (ISBN-13: 9780190637774)

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?

Author: Alan G. Gross
ISBN-10: 0190637773
ISBN-13: 9780190637774
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Language: English
Published: 07/02/2018
Pages: 328
Format: Hardcover
Weight: 1.30lbs
Size: 9.40h x 6.40w x 0.90d

Review Citation(s):
Publishers Weekly 05/07/2018