Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    The Scientific Sublime: Popular Science Unravels the Mysteries of the Universe
    The Scientific Sublime: Popular Science Unravels the Mysteries of the Universe
    The Scientific Sublime: Popular Science Unravels the Mysteries of the Universe
    Audiobook10 hours

    The Scientific Sublime: Popular Science Unravels the Mysteries of the Universe

    Written by Alan G. Gross

    Narrated by Bob Souer

    5/5

    ()

    About this audiobook

    The sublime evokes our awe, our terror, and our wonder. Applied first in ancient Greece to the heights of literary expression, in the 18th-century the sublime was extended to nature and to the sciences, enterprises that viewed the natural world as a manifestation of God's goodness, power, and wisdom.

    In The Scientific Sublime, Alan Gross reveals the modern-day sublime in popular science. He shows how the great popular scientists of our time-Richard Feynman, Stephen Hawking, Steven Weinberg, Brian Greene, Lisa Randall, Rachel Carson, Stephen Jay Gould, Steven Pinker, Richard Dawkins, and E. O. Wilson-evoke the sublime in response to fundamental questions: How did the universe begin? How did life? How did language? These authors maintain a tradition initiated by Joseph Addison, Edmund Burke, Immanuel Kant, and Adam Smith, towering 18th-century figures who adapted the literary sublime first to nature, then to science-though with one crucial difference: religion has been replaced wholly by science.

    In a final chapter, Gross explores science's attack on religion, an assault that attempts to sweep permanently under the rug two questions science cannot answer: What is the meaning of life? What is the meaning of the good life?
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHighbridge Company
    Release dateDec 28, 2018
    ISBN9781684415830
    The Scientific Sublime: Popular Science Unravels the Mysteries of the Universe

    Related to The Scientific Sublime

    Related audiobooks

    Science & Mathematics For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • Article

      The Self Is Other People

      Apr 3, 2018

      The Self Is Other People
      3 min read

    • Article

      To Infinity And (way) Beyond

      May 31, 2019

      To Infinity And (way) Beyond
      6 min read

    • Article

      Harnessing Ancient Sensitivity

      Dec 1, 2022

      Adventures in 40,000 Years of Consciousness Charles Foster Profile Books 2022 Pb, 400pp, £10.99, ISBN 9781788167185 Charles Foster’s first best-seller – Being a Beast (2016), widely praised as a “strange masterpiece” – had a premise that was hard to

      11 min read

    • Article

      The Classical Werewolf

      Nov 4, 2021

      Daniel Ogden Oxford University Press 2021 Hb, 280pp, £25, ISBN 9780198854319 Daniel Ogden has established himself as the go-to academic for scholarly, text-based surveys of supernatural motifs in the Ancient World, into which context this book fits a

      8 min read

    • Article

      Challenging Orthodox Science

      Jul 15, 2021

      TO SEND REVIEW COPIES, CONTACT THE BOOK REVIEWS EDITOR AT DVBARRETT@FORTEANTIMES.COM Imants Barušs Imprint Academic 2021 Pb, 228pp, £14.95, ISBN 9781788360418 The late William Corliss was very fond of a particular quotation from the 19th-century psyc

      11 min read

    • Article

      Who Said Science and Art Were Two Cultures?

      Nov 17, 2021

      On a May evening in 1959, C.P. Snow, a popular novelist and former research scientist, gave a lecture before a gathering of dons and students at the University of Cambridge, his alma mater. He called his talk “The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revo

      8 min read

    • Article

      Intriguing And Diverse

      Jun 16, 2022

      Genius of the Fern Loved Gully Amy Hale Strange Attractor Press 2020 Pb, 336pp, £20, ISBN 9781907222863 Ithell Colquhoun’s star is in the ascendant. Born in India in 1906, she lived a life amongst the Surrealists in the Thirties and early Forties, ha

      9 min read

    • Article

      How To Be: Lessons From The Early Greeks By Adam Nicolson Review – Ancient Wisdom For Today’s World

      Jul 18, 2023

      There was a wonderful, revelatory moment in Adam Nicolson’s last book, Life Between the Tides, where he suddenly telescoped out from the Scottish rock pool he was describing in order to meditate on the work of the pre-Socratic philosopher Heraclitus,

      3 min read

    • Article

      The Multiverse As Muse

      May 11, 2017

      In his short story “The Garden of Forking Paths,” the Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges describes a present that can, at any moment, bifurcate into different futures—an endless labyrinth of worlds. Taken together they form, he writes, “an infinite

      6 min read

    • Article

      Metaphysical Influences

      Jan 25, 2024

      Metaphysical Influences
      11 min read

    • Article

      Dark Matter Is in Our DNA

      Mar 16, 2018

      Dark Matter Is in Our DNA
      6 min read

    • Article

      SETI Dreams

      Aug 13, 2020

      Wade Roush MIT Press 2020 Pb, 221pp, £12.99, ISBN 9780262538435 If for some reason or another you feel the need to consume a history of the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) – the effort to contact aliens over vast cosmic distances via

      8 min read

    • Article

      Books

      Oct 10, 2022

      Books
      6 min read

    • Article

      On Nature Writing in a Filthy World

      Aug 15, 2018

      1. For the burgeoning fields of environmental humanities, it has long since become a commonplace notion that there isn’t really any such thing as “nature” or “wilderness”: both words used to connote real places—pristine and untouched places—but with

      11 min read

    • Article

      A Language Beyond Reason

      Feb 27, 2020

      I grew up in a scientific family. My grandmother Irene was the daughter of the physicist Max Born, who won the Nobel Prize for his work on quantum mechanics and was a close friend of Albert Einstein. She was herself scientifically well educated and h

      4 min read

    • Article

      Writing Outer Space

      Apr 12, 2018

      On the one hand, there is the world as we know it, the ground-level of human life and everything it entails: the whole arc of history, the transformation of our natural environment, nervous first dates over coffee. On the other hand, there is the rem

      9 min read

    • Article

      Edgar Allan Poe’s Other Obsession

      Jun 11, 2021

      This article was published online on June 11, 2021. In the early and macabre days of coronavirus shutdowns, Edgar Allan Poe was trending. “The Masque of the Red Death,” his Gothic tale from 1842, became in March of 2020 a go-to source for allegory: A

      9 min read

    • Article

      Ancient Wisdom, Modern Foolishness

      Sep 28, 2023

      THIS INTERESTING, SOMETIMES fascinating book is “about the first stirrings of philosophical thinking among the Iron Age Greeks”. But perhaps it’s less about those first stirrings than the last gasps of philosophical thinking in our age. It reminded m

      3 min read

    • Article

      Lives Of The Great Occultists

      Sep 10, 2020

      Personally, I blame that Aleister Crowley. If my memory serves me well (which, these days, it seldom does), Hunt Emerson and I more or less drifted into creating ‘Lives of the Great Occultists’ after I told him a couple of my favourite yarns about th

      7 min read

    • Article

      Hearing Voices and Talking Back: On Bibliomancy

      Mar 29, 2018

      I. Bibliomancy is a form of divination in which one consults a book for answers and advice. The process is simple: Stand the book up on its spine. Ask your question. Let the book fall open to a random page. With your eyes closed, place your finger on

      7 min read

    Related categories

    Reviews for The Scientific Sublime

    5/5

    1 rating1 review

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

    • 5/5
      I like this type of material and the way it is organized and presented. I would characterize myself as being very inquisitive about a lot areas.