- Science, Philosophy, Science news, Naturwissenschaften
Did Newton "unweave the rainbow" by reducing it to its prismatic colors, as Keats contended? Did he, in other words, diminish beauty? Far from it, says Dawkins - Newton's unweaving is the key to much of modern astronomy and to the breathtaking poetry of modern cosmology. Mysteries don't lose their poetry because they are solved; the solution is often more beautiful than the puzzle, uncovering deeper mystery. Dawkins takes up the most important and compelling topics in modern science, from astronomy and genetics to language and virtual reality, and combines them in a landmark statement of the human appetite for wonder.
Log it
Sign in to log this.
Character
Spare, warm, contemporary and earnest.
- sparerichly built
- warmbleak
- contemporarynostalgic
- earnestironic
- classical in formformally daring
Who loves it, who doesn't
No profiled raters yet.
Ask the title
A yes-or-no question, answered from what people wrote here, on TMDB and on Wikipedia. Never made up.
Reviews
No reviews yet.
About the book
- Author
- Richard Dawkins
- First published
- September 30, 1999
- Pages
- 352
- Publisher
- Penguin Books, Limited, Penguin Books Ltd, Mariner Books
- Editions
- 12
- Language
- French, English, Portuguese, Spanish
- ISBN
- 9780713992144
Where to read
Libraries first: a card gets you most books for nothing. Each opens that service’s page for this title.
On Open Library, 2 have read it and 4 want to.
“We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones.”
Clinton Richard Dawkins, FRS, FRSL is a British ethologist, evolutionary biologist and popular science author. He was formerly Professor for Public Understanding of Science at Oxford and was a fellow of New College, Oxford. Dawkins came to prominence with his 1976 book *The Selfish Gene*, which popularised the gene-centred view of evolution and introduced the term meme. In 1982, he made a widely cited contribution to evolutionary biology with the concept, presented in his book *The Extended Phenotype*, that the phenotypic effects of a gene are not necessarily limited to an organism's body, but can stretch far into the environment, including the bodies of other organisms. Dawkins is well know
Similar in taste
Closest on the same fourteen dimensions, from everything scored on Tastebuds Other media included when they land close.
Blueprint 201985% alikeBoth spare, warm, contemporary.
Humankind 201984% alikeBoth spare, warm, contemporary.
Darwin's dangerous idea 199579% alikeBoth spare, contemporary, classical in form.
An Immense World 202276% alikeBoth spare, contemporary, warm.
The Language Instinct 199476% alikeBoth spare, warm, contemporary.
How the Mind Works 199776% alikeBoth spare, contemporary, warm.
The Blank Slate 200274% alikeBoth spare, contemporary, classical in form.
Quiet 201274% alikeBoth earnest, warm, classical in form.
The Mind of a Chef 201275% alikeTelevision · Both contemporary, warm, spare.
Television · Both warm, spare, contemporary; this one is more intimate.