Marriage of Sense and Thought: Imaginative Participation in Science

Few would question the fact that sense experience originally provided a firm basis for empirical natural science. Yet contemporary science has reduced the world to particles and forces that lie well beyond the reach of our human senses. The extraordinary -- and alienating -- fact is that human experience no longer has a place within our scientific worldview.

The authors of this book, a revised edition of Matter and Mind, have begun to unravel this paradox. They show that the concepts of modern physics such as mass, force, or velocity are deeply rooted in the experience of specific senses. Each of our senses is a gateway into a different aspect of the world. This insight throws a new light on the dilemmas of contemporary science, such as the wave-particle duality in quantum mechanics.

By recognizing the essential role of sense perception in scientific knowledge, this highly readable book lays the foundations for a science that, while maintaining its rigorous methodology, can begin to incorporate the fullness of human experience into its domain.

Stephen Edelglass was a founding member of SENSRI and its co-director until his death in November 2000. He was a graduate of MIT (BS and MS in mechanical engineering) and the Stevens Institute of Technology (MS, physics, and Ph.D. in metallurgy). Dr. Edelglass was a Professor of mechanical engineering at Cooper Union in New York, Director of Science at the Threefold Educational Foundation in Chestnut Ridge, New York, and a member of the graduate faculty at Sunbridge College in Spring Valley. He was the recipient of a National Science Foundation Faculty Fellowship. He was the author of several books on materials science and philosophy of science and wrote a number of research papers in the areas of materials science, epistemology, and pedagogy. Dr. Edelglass was coauthor of Being on Earth (2006) and The Marriage of Sense and Thought (1997). His later writings and lectures have been recently published as The Physics of Human Experience (2006).