The Invisible Century : Einstein, Freud and the Search for Hidden Universes - Hardcover

Richard Panek

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1841152773 ISBN 13: 9781841152776

Publisher: Fourth Estate, 2005

Synopsis

From the acclaimed author of 'Seeing and Believing'. In clear and vivid prose, Richard Panek examines two of history's greatest thinkers, Einstein and Freud, to offer a fresh portrait of the extraordinary scientific developments of the 20th-century. At the dawn of the 20th-century there was a widespread assumption in scientific circles that the pursuit of knowledge was nearing its end and that all available evidence had been exhausted. By 1916, however, both Einstein and Freud had exploded this myth by leading exploration into the science of the Invisible and Unconscious, using scientific data that we cannot see. These men were more than just contemporaries -- their separate pursuits were in fact complementary. Freud's science of Psychoanalysis found its cosmological counterpart in the Astronomy of Invisible Light that Einstein pioneered. Together they questioned the inconsistencies of Newton's ordered cosmos to reveal a different reality, a natural order that was anything but ordered, a cosmos that was volatile and vast -- an organism alive in time. Einstein and Freud inspired a fundamental shift in the history of human thought, transforming forever our understanding of the world and our place within it. In accessible and stylish prose, Panek chronicles a scientific revolution that is still in progress today.

About this title

About the Author:

Richard Panek has written for The New York Times Magazine, Outside, Esquire and the Chicago Tribune, and is a contributing writer at Elle and Mirabella. He is the winner of a PEN award for short fiction (which has been broadcast on National Public Radio). He is also the author of Waterloo Diamonds, a social history of an Iowa community told through it's baseball fortunes.

From Publishers Weekly:

Veteran science writer Panek's pairing of the dual icons Einstein and Freud, whose labors were in widely disparate fields, is both natural and inspired. He uses his formidable writing skills to illuminate two of the 20th century's most notable accomplishments, the theory of general relativity and the discovery of the unconscious, weaving them into an informative and interesting history of the scientific method. Panek's explanation of Einstein's theory of relativity is excellent, and readers will with pleasure understand this counterintuitive concept. He is equally good at describing how Freud developed his theory of the unconscious. Panek also describes how the two rejected the 19th-century scientific paradigm, which held that the more accurate measurement of physical aspects of the universe would unravel its secrets. As Panek (Seeing and Believing) states, "...Einstein and Freud wound up venturing where their contemporaries did not because at a certain point, they didn't investigate. They thought. They reconceived the problem." Besides providing valuable biographical detail about both Freud and Einstein, Panek demonstrates a wide-ranging knowledge of the development of scientific thought and philosophy, as well as the major developments in both cosmology and the study of human anatomy. There is a remarkable amount of information in this short book, and Panek's valuable thesis—that the triumph of 20th-century science was the discovery of the invisible workings of the universe and ourselves—is well made.
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About this edition

• Publisher: Fourth Estate
• Publication date: 2005
• ISBN 10: 1841152773
• ISBN 13: 9781841152776
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 258