A Science Odyssey

Fülszöveg

The most sweeping and startiing scientific changes in humán history have occurred during the past one hundred years. From the first Wright Flyer to Mars landings, from penicillin to organ transplants, from the telegraph to the vast realm of cyberspace, A Science Odyssey is just that: a voyage of discovery that reveals mysteries of outer space and the natural world, as well as humán inventions and ideas scarcely imaginable to our grandparents. A Science Odyssey helps us understand and appreciate the accelerating impact of scientific knowledge today and into the next century.
This book is an adjunct of the acclaimed PBS series, hosted by Charles Osgood and produced by the distinguished science unit at WGBH Boston. But it is alsó an exciting introduction to science and the history of ideas in its own right, colorfully and accessibly exploring the wonders of technology, astronomy, the earth sciences, physics, biochemistry, medicine, humán behavior, and paleoanthropology.
During the... Tovább

Fülszöveg

The most sweeping and startiing scientific changes in humán history have occurred during the past one hundred years. From the first Wright Flyer to Mars landings, from penicillin to organ transplants, from the telegraph to the vast realm of cyberspace, A Science Odyssey is just that: a voyage of discovery that reveals mysteries of outer space and the natural world, as well as humán inventions and ideas scarcely imaginable to our grandparents. A Science Odyssey helps us understand and appreciate the accelerating impact of scientific knowledge today and into the next century.
This book is an adjunct of the acclaimed PBS series, hosted by Charles Osgood and produced by the distinguished science unit at WGBH Boston. But it is alsó an exciting introduction to science and the history of ideas in its own right, colorfully and accessibly exploring the wonders of technology, astronomy, the earth sciences, physics, biochemistry, medicine, humán behavior, and paleoanthropology.
During the twentieth century, each of these scientific disciplines underwent a radical revolution. Until our own time, no one could have imagined that the continents are constantly on the move, fixed to vast plates that slide over and bang against each other, rocking the earth; that something like 90 percent of the universe, its "dark matter," is invisible and so far unknowable, all around us in somé form that might hold the most important secret of all; that genetics proves there are no such things as genetic racial distinctions (there is a race we call humanity, and it is genetically all one); that while the universe is unfathomably large as we look backward in time to see the stars farthest off, the stuff of which we're made is just as unfathomably tiny—millions of times smaller than the atoms we learned about in high school.
In five chapters, Charles Flowers shows that science is a humán endeavor that cannot be separated from its historical, cultural, and social Vissza