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Author: Marcelo Gleiser
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1439127867
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 306
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Book Description
For millennia, shamans and philosophers, believers and nonbelievers, artists and scientists have tried to make sense of our existence by suggesting that everything is connected, that a mysterious Oneness binds us to everything else. People go to temples, churches, mosques, and synagogues to pray to their divine incarnation of Oneness. Following a surprisingly similar notion, scientists have long asserted that under Nature’s apparent complexity there is a simpler underlying reality. In its modern incarnation, this Theory of Everything would unite the physical laws governing very large bodies (Einstein’s theory of relativity) and those governing tiny ones (quantum mechanics) into a single framework. But despite the brave efforts of many powerful minds, the Theory of Everything remains elusive. It turns out that the universe is not elegant. It is gloriously messy. Overturning more than twenty-five centuries of scientific thought, award-winning physicist Marcelo Gleiser argues that this quest for a Theory of Everything is fundamentally misguided, and he explains the volcanic implications this ideological shift has for humankind. All the evidence points to a scenario in which everything emerges from fundamental imperfections, primordial asymmetries in matter and time, cataclysmic accidents in Earth’s early life, and duplication errors in the genetic code. Imbalance spurs creation. Without asymmetries and imperfections, the universe would be filled with nothing but smooth radiation. A Tear at the Edge of Creation calls for nothing less than a new "humancentrism" to reflect our position in the universal order. All life, but intelligent life in particular, is a rare and precious accident. Our presence here has no meaning outside of itself, but it does have meaning. The unplanned complexity of humankind is all the more beautiful for its improbability. It’s time for science to let go of the old aesthetic that labels perfection beautiful and holds that "beauty is truth." It’s time to look at the evidence without centuries of monotheistic baggage. In this lucid, down-to-earth narrative, Gleiser walks us through the basic and cutting-edge science that fueled his own transformation from unifier to doubter—a fascinating scientific quest that led him to a new understanding of what it is to be human.
Author: Marcelo Gleiser
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1439127867
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 306
Get Book
Book Description
For millennia, shamans and philosophers, believers and nonbelievers, artists and scientists have tried to make sense of our existence by suggesting that everything is connected, that a mysterious Oneness binds us to everything else. People go to temples, churches, mosques, and synagogues to pray to their divine incarnation of Oneness. Following a surprisingly similar notion, scientists have long asserted that under Nature’s apparent complexity there is a simpler underlying reality. In its modern incarnation, this Theory of Everything would unite the physical laws governing very large bodies (Einstein’s theory of relativity) and those governing tiny ones (quantum mechanics) into a single framework. But despite the brave efforts of many powerful minds, the Theory of Everything remains elusive. It turns out that the universe is not elegant. It is gloriously messy. Overturning more than twenty-five centuries of scientific thought, award-winning physicist Marcelo Gleiser argues that this quest for a Theory of Everything is fundamentally misguided, and he explains the volcanic implications this ideological shift has for humankind. All the evidence points to a scenario in which everything emerges from fundamental imperfections, primordial asymmetries in matter and time, cataclysmic accidents in Earth’s early life, and duplication errors in the genetic code. Imbalance spurs creation. Without asymmetries and imperfections, the universe would be filled with nothing but smooth radiation. A Tear at the Edge of Creation calls for nothing less than a new "humancentrism" to reflect our position in the universal order. All life, but intelligent life in particular, is a rare and precious accident. Our presence here has no meaning outside of itself, but it does have meaning. The unplanned complexity of humankind is all the more beautiful for its improbability. It’s time for science to let go of the old aesthetic that labels perfection beautiful and holds that "beauty is truth." It’s time to look at the evidence without centuries of monotheistic baggage. In this lucid, down-to-earth narrative, Gleiser walks us through the basic and cutting-edge science that fueled his own transformation from unifier to doubter—a fascinating scientific quest that led him to a new understanding of what it is to be human.
Author: Michael Gold
Publisher: Wipf and Stock Publishers
ISBN: 1532653751
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 222
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Book Description
What is reality? Is reality both mind and matter, body and soul, as taught by Western religions such as Judaism, Christianity, and Islam? This is dualism, the approach of philosophers from Plato to Descartes. Or is reality only matter, as taught by many modern scientists and philosophers? This is materialism, the approach of philosophers from Hobbes to Marx. Or is reality only mind, as taught by Eastern religions and Western mystics. This is the approach of philosophers from Berkeley to Whitehead. The beginning of Genesis allows for multiple translations and interpretations. We will read the creation story in Genesis from the point of view of each of these three approaches—dualism, materialism, and idealism. In doing so, we will tell three very different creation stories. These stories will take us on a fascinating journey through science, philosophy, and religion. Join us on this journey as we explore issues such as does God perform miracles, why is there evil in the universe, was Darwin correct, can robots have souls, and if light is a wave, what is waving?
Author: Marc Elihu Hofstadter
Publisher: Dog Ear Publishing
ISBN: 1608448223
Category : American essys
Languages : en
Pages : 278
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Book Description
Healing the Split consists of the collected essays of poet, literary critic and philosopher Marc Elihu Hofstadter. The essays stretch from Hofstadter's early scholarly articles about poets William Carlos Williams and Yves Bonnefoy through articles published in the Redwood Coast Review about poetry, art, music, science, politics and France to recent articles concerning the "split" between the sciences and the humanities, reason and feeling/intuition/faith. The book embodies Hofstadter's consistent belief in the idea that all human activities are composed of an "objective" element and a "subjective" element. Human knowledge, whether scientific, mathematical, philosophical or artistic, contains a degree of objective certainty mixed with a component of subjective feeling. The differences between science and the humanities are differences of degree of objectivity, not of essence, and the knowledge the humanities display is a genuine form of knowledge, less certain than science but rich in tangible, felt experience. Even early in his career as a literary critic, Hofstadter was interested in how such otherwise diverse poets as Williams and Bonnefoy sacralize the coming together of mind and world in all forms of human experience. As Williams put it, "No ideas but in things "-by which he meant, not, Let there not be any ideas but, Let all ideas be inextricably entwined with the physical world Hofstadter argues that, in all our activities, there is a mixture of the thinking, reasoning mind and the parts of us that feel, perceive, touch-our bodies, our hearts. Science and philosophy are the great achievements of the mind, while art and religion are the most powerful consummations of sensing and feeling-yet science and philosophy are partly emotive, and art and theology partly rational. The difference, again, is in degree. Healing the Split is an attempt to bring reason and feeling/intuition/faith together, to show how they are intimately related. The Buddhist faith is key to this effort, because Buddhism doesn't analyze out reason and non-rational knowledge as separate faculties but tries to unite them in a direct, embodied kind of experience that "heals the split" between them and makes the individual human being whole. In Buddhism, everything we know is known through consciousness, and distinctions between subject and object, mind and world, logic and faith become artificial, since consciousness is essentially unitary. And Buddhism sees all phenomena, known through consciousness, as being related in a universal "web" everything is connected ultimately to everything else, and the world is essentially One. Healing the Split is finally a work of mysticism in the line of Parmenides, who believed that everything is one, or the Kabbalists, who worshipped the All in the form of "Ha Shem" the unnamable "Name." Marc Elihu Hofstadter was born in New York City in 1945. He received his B.A. in French literature from Swarthmore College in 1967 and his Ph.D. in Literature from the University of California at Santa Cruz in 1975. He has taught American literature at Santa Cruz, the Universite d'Orleans (on a Fulbright Lectureship) and Tel Aviv University. In 1980 he obtained his Master of Library Science degree from the University of California at Berkeley, and from 1982 to 2005 served as the Librarian of the City of San Francisco's transit agency. He has published five volumes of poetry: House of Peace, Visions, Shark's Tooth, Luck and Rising at 5 AM, all of which are available on amazon.com, and his poems, translations and essays have appeared in over sixty magazines. He lives in the retirement community of Rossmoor in Walnut Creek, California with his partner, the artist David Zurlin.
Author: Eluned Summers-Bremner
Publisher: Reaktion Books
ISBN: 1789147352
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 324
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Book Description
A meandering celebration of the indirect and unforeseen path, revealing that to err is not just human—it is everything. This book explores how, far from being an act limited to deviation from known pathways or desirable plans of action, wandering is an abundant source of meaning—a force as intimately involved in the history of our universe as it will be in the future of our planet. In ancient Australian Aboriginal cosmology, in works about the origins of democracy and surviving disasters in ancient Greece, in Eurasian steppe nomadic culture, in the lifeways of the Roma, in the movements of today’s refugees, and in our attempts to preserve spaces of untracked online freedom, wandering is how creativity and skills of adaptation are preserved in the interests of ongoing life. Astray is an enthralling look at belonging and at notions of alienation and hope.
Author: Marcelo Gleiser
Publisher: UPNE
ISBN: 1611683955
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 354
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Book Description
Available again, with a new preface, a physicist's "exceptionally clear summary of 2,500 years of science and a fascinating account of the ways in which it often does intersect with spiritual beliefs" --Kirkus Reviews
Author: Mary-Jane Rubenstein
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 023152742X
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 358
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Book Description
A religion professor elucidates the theory of the multiverse, its history, and its reception in science, philosophy, religion, and literature. Multiverse cosmologies imagine our universe as just one of a vast number of others. Beginning with ancient Atomist and Stoic philosophies, Mary-Jane Rubenstein links contemporary models of the multiverse to their forerunners and explores the reasons for their recent appearance. One concerns the so-called fine-tuning of the universe: nature's constants are so delicately calibrated that it seems they have been set just right to allow life to emerge. For some thinkers, these "fine-tunings" are evidence of the existence of God; for others, however, and for most physicists, "God" is an insufficient scientific explanation. Hence the multiverse’s allure: if all possible worlds exist somewhere, then like monkeys hammering out Shakespeare, one universe is bound to be suitable for life. Of course, this hypothesis replaces God with an equally baffling article of faith: the existence of universes beyond, before, or after our own, eternally generated yet forever inaccessible to observation or experiment. In their very efforts to sidestep metaphysics, theoretical physicists propose multiverse scenarios that collide with it and even produce counter-theological narratives. Far from invalidating multiverse hypotheses, Rubenstein argues, this interdisciplinary collision actually secures their scientific viability. We may therefore be witnessing a radical reconfiguration of physics, philosophy, and religion in the modern turn to the multiverse. “Rubenstein’s witty, thought-provoking history of philosophy and physics leaves one in awe of just how close Thomas Aquinas and American physicist Steven Weinberg are in spirit as they seek ultimate answers.”—Publishers Weekly “A fun, mind-stretching read, clear and enlightening.”—San Francisco Book Review
Author:
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004302239
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 304
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Book Description
The first book devoted entirely to Robinson familiarizes readers with the major currents in her thought from a diversity of perspectives—Romanticism, ecocriticism, medicine and literature, religion and literature, theology, American Studies, critical race theory, and feminist and gender studies—that reflects the amplitude and fecundity of Robinson’s art and thought.
Author: Adam Frank
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1439169608
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 418
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Book Description
"The Big Bang is dead and astrophysicist Adam Frank explains how our experience of time will change as a result"--
Author: Ronald Green
Publisher: John Hunt Publishing
ISBN: 1785356968
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 282
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Book Description
Time seems to flash by when we are enjoying ourselves, and slows to a crawl when we are bored. Why? Does time exist, or is it an illusion? Does it flow? Is it linear? How real are our memories? When is now? These are just some of the questions that Time To Tell asks in its foray into what time is for us, what it does to us and for us, and how we live and react to it in our daily lives. Digging down to the roots of our lived experience in the world, Time To Tell takes us through a journey replete with twists and turns and “aha!” moments. Challenging the obvious, the book asks us to look anew at our perspective of what we naturally take for granted. Rattling the comfort of instant satisfaction, of reality shows, celebrity worship and the self-glorification of the I-generation, Ronald Green, with panache and authority, takes us on a journey that allows us a new way of looking at ourselves in the world, and to act upon what we discover.
Author: Margaret Bullitt-Jonas
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0375700870
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 274
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Book Description
A wrenchingly honest, eloquent memoir “about true nourishment that comes not from [eating] but from engaging on a spiritual path."—Los Angeles Times In this brave and perceptive account of compulsion and the healing process, Bullitt-Jonas describes a childhood darkened by the repressive shadows of her alcoholic father and her emotionally reclusive mother, whose demands for excellence, poise, and self-control drove Bullitt-Jonas to develop an insatiable hunger. What began with pilfering extra slices of bread at her parents' dinner table turned into binges with cream pies and pancakes, sometimes gaining as much as eleven pounds in four days. When the family urged her father into treatment, the author recognized her own addiction and embarked on the path to recovery by discovering the spiritual hunger beneath her craving for food.
