To Explain the World: The Discovery of Modern Science

Steven Weinberg

Feb 2015 · Harper Collins

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The Nobel Prize–winner shares “a masterful journey through humankind’s scientific coming-of-age” from the Greeks to modern times (Brian Greene).

In this rich, irreverent, and compelling history, Nobel Prize-winning physicist Steven Weinberg takes us across centuries of human striving to unravel the mysteries of the world. This sweeping saga ranges from ancient Miletus to medieval Baghdad and Oxford, from Plato’s Academy and the Museum of Alexandria to the cathedral school of Chartres and the Royal Society of London.

Weinberg shows that, while the scientists of ancient and medieval times lack our understanding of the world, they also lacked the knowledge, tools, and intellectual framework necessary to go about understand it. Yet over the centuries, through the struggle to solve such mysteries as the curious backward movement of the planets and the rise and fall of the tides, the modern discipline of science eventually emerged.

An illuminating exploration of the way we consider and analyze the world around us, To Explain the World is a sweeping, ambitious account of how difficult it was to discover the goals and methods of modern science, and the impact of this discovery on human knowledge and development.

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Steven Weinberg is a theoretical physicist and the winner of the Nobel Prize in Physics, the National Medal of Science, the Lewis Thomas Prize for the Scientist as Poet, and numerous honorary degrees and other awards. He is a member of the National Academy of Science, the Royal Society of London, the American Philosophical Society, and other academies. A longtime contributor to the New York Review of Books, he is also the author of The First Three Minutes, Dreams of a Final Theory, Facing Up, and Lake Views, as well as leading treatises on theoretical physics. He holds the Josey Regental Chair in Science at the University of Texas at Austin.