To Explain the World: The Discovery of Modern Science.

WEINBERG, Steven.

$500.00

Item Number: 125653

New York: Harper, 2015.

First edition of this “thoughtful history of science” (The New Yorker). Octavo, original half cloth. Association copy, inscribed by on the title page, “To Roy Snodgrass with thanks for friendly help Steven Weinberg.” The recipient was a close friend of the authors. Fine in a near fine dust jacket. Jacket design by Milan Bozic.

In this rich, irreverent, and compelling history, Nobel Prize-winning physicist Steven Weinberg takes us across centuries 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. He shows that the scientists of ancient and medieval times not only did not understand what we understand about the world—they did not understand what there is to understand, or how to 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. Along the way, Weinberg examines historic clashes and collaborations between science and the competing spheres of religion, technology, poetry, mathematics, and philosophy.