The Invisible Century: Einstein, Freud, and the Search for Hidden Universes - Hardcover

Panek, Richard

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0670030740 ISBN 13: 9780670030743

Publisher: Viking Adult, 2004

Synopsis

Describes the commonalities in the scientific methods pioneered by Albert Einstein and Sigmund Freud, citing how their applications of non-traditional methods opened up unprecedented intellectual landscapes and founded the sciences of cosmology and psychoanalysis. 20,000 first printing.

About this title

About the Author

Richard Panek regularly writes about science for The New York Times and Natural History, where he has served as a monthly astronomy columnist. He has also written about astronomy and cosmology for Esquire, Outside, Discover, World Book Encyclopedia, and National Public Radio. His previous book is Seeing and Believing: How the Telescope Opened Our Eyes and Minds to the Heavens.

Reviews

Veteran science writer Panek's pairing of the dual icons Einstein and Freud, whose labors were in widely disparate fields, is both natural and inspired. He uses his formidable writing skills to illuminate two of the 20th century's most notable accomplishments, the theory of general relativity and the discovery of the unconscious, weaving them into an informative and interesting history of the scientific method. Panek's explanation of Einstein's theory of relativity is excellent, and readers will with pleasure understand this counterintuitive concept. He is equally good at describing how Freud developed his theory of the unconscious. Panek also describes how the two rejected the 19th-century scientific paradigm, which held that the more accurate measurement of physical aspects of the universe would unravel its secrets. As Panek (Seeing and Believing) states, "...Einstein and Freud wound up venturing where their contemporaries did not because at a certain point, they didn't investigate. They thought. They reconceived the problem." Besides providing valuable biographical detail about both Freud and Einstein, Panek demonstrates a wide-ranging knowledge of the development of scientific thought and philosophy, as well as the major developments in both cosmology and the study of human anatomy. There is a remarkable amount of information in this short book, and Panek's valuable thesis—that the triumph of 20th-century science was the discovery of the invisible workings of the universe and ourselves—is well made.
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A less likely pairing emerges in this book--Einstein and Sigmund Freud. Although they met just once and didn't know what to make of each other's work, Einstein and Freud became the foremost proponents of research on the frontier of the invisible, the search for the next level of scientific data--evidence we can't see.

Editors of Scientific American

Packing Einstein and Freud together, science journalist Panek considers the philosophical aspects of each thinker's speculative leaps. Panek thinks their departures from pure empiricism are worth comparing because the success of Einstein's theory of general relativity contrasts with the failure of Freud's theories about the subconscious to be accorded the status of a science. Approaching matters historically, Panek discusses the limits of measurability that physics and physiology were bumping up against when Einstein and Freud, a generation apart, were starting their careers. As the author states, relativity had been part of physics since Galileo, but Einstein boldly intuited, without solid contemporary evidence, that relativity must knit together mass, motion, and electromagnetism. Also without proof, Freud vaulted from the 1890s state of knowledge about neuroanatomy to the idea that the psyche could be broken into analytical parts. The difference between each man's venture into the "invisible," as Panek's title puts it, is that Einstein has been vindicated whereas Freud has not. Readers drawn to philosophies of science will be Panek's best audience. Gilbert Taylor
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Edition details

• Publisher: Viking Adult
• Publication date: 2004
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0670030740
• ISBN 13: 9780670030743
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 272