The Day the Universe Changed

Fülszöveg

ames Burke was born in 1936. After graduating from Jesus College, Oxford, he taught in Bologna and Rome and worked as an interpreter and translator. Since 1965 he has been writing, producing, and presenting television programs on current affairs and science. After doing BBC-TV's "Tomorrow's World," he became the BBC's chief correspondent for the NASA Apollo missions. In 1972 he began his own weekly television series, "The Burke Special."
"Connections," Burke's prize-winning ten-part history of innovation, has been broadcast in more than fifty countries and achieved the highest audience for a PBS network documentary program when it was broadcast in 1978. The companion book to the series was a best-seller in both the United States and England.
For his television achievements James Burke has received the Royal Television Society silver and gold medals, among other awards.
THE DAY THE UNIVERSE CHANGED
Primitive man believed that the heavens were ruled by frightful demons and... Tovább

Fülszöveg

ames Burke was born in 1936. After graduating from Jesus College, Oxford, he taught in Bologna and Rome and worked as an interpreter and translator. Since 1965 he has been writing, producing, and presenting television programs on current affairs and science. After doing BBC-TV's "Tomorrow's World," he became the BBC's chief correspondent for the NASA Apollo missions. In 1972 he began his own weekly television series, "The Burke Special."
"Connections," Burke's prize-winning ten-part history of innovation, has been broadcast in more than fifty countries and achieved the highest audience for a PBS network documentary program when it was broadcast in 1978. The companion book to the series was a best-seller in both the United States and England.
For his television achievements James Burke has received the Royal Television Society silver and gold medals, among other awards.
THE DAY THE UNIVERSE CHANGED
Primitive man believed that the heavens were ruled by frightful demons and spirits, and that a giant dragon devoured the moon each night. Medieval man, convinced by the ancient Egyptian astronomers, thought that the moon, sun, and planets revolved around the earth. Today we believe that the universe is governed by fixed and discoverable physical laws. But what about the man of the future? How many of our "scientific" principles will he scoff at and denounce as crude superstitions?
In The Day the Universe Changed J^mes Burke argues that knowledge is a man-made artifact, and that when man's views of reality are changed by knowledge, reality itself changes. Armed with this provocative thesis, he charts a course from the Middle Ages to today, examining those critical periods in history when the ideas and institutions that have transformed man's understanding of the world were born.
The Day the Universe Changed takes as its starting point the rediscovery of the teachings of classical Greece in the eleventh century, which stimulated the passion for scientific learning and divided the medieval world from the modern world. Later chapters consider the rediscovery of perspective geometry in Renaissance Florence and its relation to the notion of Vissza