Joe Schwartz makes plain that great moments of individual creativity - the work of Galileo and Newton, Einstein figuring out relativity - must in fact be viewed as part of a social context. Yet in the last 100 years science has progressively alienated itself from the rest of culture, to the point where it is not only a mystery to most, but actually operating in an increasingly dangerous void. Choosing a number of significant "moments" from 17th-century Florence (Galileo) to Cold Spring Harbour, USA in 1946 (molecular biology), Schwartz ventures to act as a sort of critic of science, showing famous advances in a new light.
Galileo invents a mathematical language for physical description, thus protecting himself from the Church; Einstein's relativity theory arises from the Industrial Revolution; the bomb-making physicists of Los Alamos, vulnerable from their background in inter-war Europe, are manipulated by the American military; AIDS researchers, caught up in the traditions of molecular biology, are locked into a pattern of investigation that may well be perilously misguided; physicists enchanted with numbers lose the capacity to understand why the numbers work and as a result have come up with no new ideas since the 1920s. The author is a physicist who has also written "Einstein For Beginners".
- ISBN10 0224035401
- ISBN13 9780224035408
- Publish Date 18 June 1992
- Publish Status Out of Print
- Out of Print 13 May 1993
- Publish Country GB
- Publisher Vintage Publishing
- Imprint Jonathan Cape Ltd
- Format Hardcover
- Pages 252
- Language English