Synopses & Reviews
A vivid and captivating narrative about how modern science broke free of ancient philosophy, and how theoretical physics is returning to its unscientific roots.
In the early seventeenth century Galileo broke free from the hold of ancient Platonic and Aristotelian philosophy. He drastically changed the framework through which we view the natural world when he asserted that we should base our theory of reality on what we can observe rather than pure thought. In the process, he invented what we would come to call science. This set the stage for all the breakthroughs that followed — from Kepler to Newton to Einstein. But in the early twentieth century when quantum physics, with its deeply complex mathematics, entered into the picture, something began to change. Many physicists began looking to the equations first and physical reality second. As we investigate realms further and further from what we can see and what we can test, we must look to elegant, aesthetically pleasing equations to develop our conception of what reality is. As a result, much of theoretical physics today is something more akin to the philosophy of Plato than the science to which the physicists are heirs. In The Dream Universe, Lindley asks what is science when it becomes completely untethered from measurable phenomena?
Review
"David Lindley's The Dream Universe is one of those Big Idea books that achieve the kind of irresistible, tightrope balance between pithy and profound, between considerable charm and disarming simplicity, that can arise only from a mastery of a subject--in this case nothing less than the history of how we think about the cosmos, from Babylonian astrology to the quantum revolution and, now, back again: a fight, Lindley argues, for the soul of science." Richard Panek, author of The Trouble with Gravity: Solving the Mystery Beneath Our Feet
Review
"[An] eye-opening treatise...Lindley's probing work raises important questions about what science should be, and how it should be approached." Publishers Weekly
Review
"A striking examination of an important scientific question: 'What, exactly, are scholars of fundamental physics today trying to achieve?'...A delightful addition to a widespread, ongoing scientific debate." Kirkus (starred review)
About the Author
David Lindley holds a Ph.D. in astrophysics from Sussex University and has been an editor at Nature, Science, and Science News. Now a full-time writer, he is the author of Uncertainty, The End of Physics, Where Does the Weirdness Go?, The Science of Jurassic Park, Boltzmann's Atom, and Degrees Kelvin. He was also the recipient of the Phi Beta Kappa science writing prize. He lives in Alexandria, Virginia.