The Common Sense of Science - Softcover

Bronowski, Jacob

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0571241891 ISBN 13: 9780571241897

Publisher: Faber and Faber, 2011

Synopsis

Jacob Bronowski was, with Kenneth Clarke, the greatest popularizer of serious ideas in Britain between the mid 1950s and the early 1970s. Trained as a mathematician, he was equally at home with painting and physics, and wrote a series of brilliant books that tried to break down the barriers between 'the two cultures'. He denounced 'the destructive modern prejudice that art and science are different and somehow incompatible interests'. He wrote a fine book on William Blake while running the National Coal Board's research establishment. The Common Sense of Science, first published in 1951, is a vivid attempt to explain in ordinary language how science is done and how scientists think. He isolates three creative ideas that have been central to science: the idea of order, the idea of causes and the idea of chance. For Bronowski, these were common-sense ideas that became immensely powerful and productive when applied to a vision of the world that broke with the medieval notion of a world of things ordered according to their ideal natures. Instead, Galileo, Huyghens and Newton and their contemporaries imagined 'a world of events running in a steady mechanism of before and after'. We are still living with the consequences of this search for order and causality within the facts that the world presents to us.

About this title

About the Author

Jacob Bronowski was born in Poland in 1908. At the age of 12 he came to England, and within six years was a brilliant mathematics student at Cambridge. During the war he helped to forecast the economic effects of bombing Germany. After many years working for the National Coal Board, he moved to the Salk Institute in 1964 while developing his career as a broadcaster. In 1973, he presented for the BBC the ambitious 13-part series The Ascent of Man, which made him a household name. He died the following year.

Review

[Dr.Bronowski] has packed more thought, more idealism, and more uncommon sense then have probably ever before appeared between book covers in anywhere near so small a compass. "The Common Sense of Science is at once a brief history of science from the time of Isaac Newton to the time of Albert Einstein; a guide to the relation of science (pure as well as applied) to our thinking, our ordinary lives, and ourselves; and a moving appeal for mutual understanding between science and general culture. This sensitive, searching book is concerned with the nature of science and the relation of its central creative ideas to other human activities...�"The Common Sense of Science"�, like a fine glass of brandy, is a rich and satisfying distillment. �Dr.Bronowski� has packed more thought, more idealism, and more uncommon sense then have probably ever before appeared between book covers in anywhere near so small a compass. "The Common Sense of Science" is at once a brief history of science from the time of Isaac Newton to the time of Albert Einstein; a guide to the relation of science (pure as well as applied) to our thinking, our ordinary lives, and ourselves; and a moving appeal for mutual understanding between science and general culture.

Edition details

• Publisher: Faber and Faber
• Publication date: 2011
• ISBN 10: 0571241891
• ISBN 13: 9780571241897
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 160