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Loading... The Invisible Century: Einstein, Freud, and the Search for Hidden Universes (edition 2005)by Richard Panek (Author)
Work InformationThe Invisible Century: Einstein, Freud, and the Search for Hidden Universes by Richard Panek
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Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book. No current Talk conversations about this book. Richard Panek skillfully helps the reader understand the state of the physics and psychology at the turn of the 20th century. His twin trajectories of the lives of Einstein and Freud help to shape a fun theory that both major discoveries were due to each researcher realizing that their perception of the universe had to change in order to more properly interpret the results they were seeing. A quick but startling read. no reviews | add a review
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. No library descriptions found. |
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Google Books — Loading... GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)501Natural sciences and mathematics General Science Philosophy and theoryLC ClassificationRatingAverage:
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It does cover two of the incredible revolutions of 19th-20th science, the one in physics and the other in psychology, but it does it in a tortuous and meandering way.
Yes, I did get the urgency of the feelings driving Einstein and Freud forward, but sometimes the descriptions seemed contrived, even made-up and lacked any footnote or source.
The larger problem is that the author likes to write a lot when he can be more succinct, a phenomenon called verbiage. It go so dense towards the end that I just couldn't traverse the final lengthy chapter which just went on and on and on about the uniqueness of the scientific revolution (see what I mean?).
So read this book, by all means, but there's a caveat added. ( )