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The Fermenting Universe
113 pages, Paperback
First published August 1, 1981
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November 22, 2014
I bought this book when I took Malville's introductory astronomy class thirty odd years ago. At the time I probably only read the first chapter. I came across it in a box last month and now I've finally read it.
In the physical sense, it's an insubstantial book. Just over a hundred pages of text with a few diagrams thrown in. But like Doctor Who's tardis, it's bigger on the inside.
Malville uses religious myths from around the world to help explain topics of physics, quantum mechanics, cosmology, and time. He doesn't go into any great detail on the science, such that even though the field of cosmology has advanced great strides in thirty years, I believe the book is still fundamentally true.
The book's subtitle is "Myths of Eternal Change". He makes the point very early that science itself is a myth. We put a lot of effort into figuring out how the world works, fabricate stories and narratives only to have them superseded by new structures - the Ptolemaic system replaced by the Copernican and Newtonian physics replaced by Einstein, for example. Even knowing something of the history of science, I never would have described science as mythic. But the man has a point.
In the physical sense, it's an insubstantial book. Just over a hundred pages of text with a few diagrams thrown in. But like Doctor Who's tardis, it's bigger on the inside.
Malville uses religious myths from around the world to help explain topics of physics, quantum mechanics, cosmology, and time. He doesn't go into any great detail on the science, such that even though the field of cosmology has advanced great strides in thirty years, I believe the book is still fundamentally true.
The book's subtitle is "Myths of Eternal Change". He makes the point very early that science itself is a myth. We put a lot of effort into figuring out how the world works, fabricate stories and narratives only to have them superseded by new structures - the Ptolemaic system replaced by the Copernican and Newtonian physics replaced by Einstein, for example. Even knowing something of the history of science, I never would have described science as mythic. But the man has a point.
Displaying 1 of 1 review