A book which offers fresh perspectives on the scientific developments of the past hundred years through the complementary work of two of the century’s greatest thinkers, Einstein and Freud.At the turn of the 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. However, by 1916 both Einstein and Freud had exploded the myth by leading exploration into the science of the invisible and the unconscious. 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 pioneered by Einstein. Together they questioned the little 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. These men inspired a fundamental shift in the history of human thought. They began a revolution that is still in progress and provided one of the past century’s greatest contributions to the history of science.
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Richard Panek. The Invisible Century: Einstein, Freud and the Search for Hidden Universes
THE INVISIBLE CENTURY
RICHARD PANEK
DEDICATION
Epigraph
CONTENTS
PROLOGUE
ONE MORE THINGS IN HEAVEN
TWO MORE THINGS ON EARTH
THREE GOING TO EXTREMES
FOUR A LEAP OF FAITH
FIVE THE DESCENT OF A MAN
SIX A DISCOURSE CONCERNING TWO NEW SCIENCES
NOTES
EPIGRAPH
PROLOGUE
ONE: MORE THINGS IN HEAVEN
TWO: MORE THINGS ON EARTH
THREE: GOING TO EXTREMES
FOUR: A LEAP OF FAITH
FIVE: THE DESCENT OF A MAN
SIX: A DISCOURSE CONCERNING TWO NEW SCIENCES
BIBLIOGRAPHY
INDEX
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
ALSO BY THE AUTHOR
COPYRIGHT
ABOUT THE PUBLISHER
Отрывок из книги
EINSTEIN, FREUD
THE SEARCH FOR
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Einstein had been spending the evening with a longtime friend both from his student years and at the patent office, Michele Besso, the two of them talking, as they often did in their off-hours, about physics. In the preceding three years, Einstein had moved to Bern, gotten married, and fathered two children (one illegitimate, whom he and Mileva gave up for adoption). Yet all the while he’d been applying himself to the most pressing issues of contemporary physics, often in the company of his patent-office sounding board, Besso. On this particular occasion, Einstein had approached Besso for the express purpose of doing “battle” with a problem that had been plaguing him on and off for the past decade. After a lively discussion, Einstein returned home, where, all at once, he understood what he and everyone else who had been studying the situation had been overlooking all along.
“Thank you!” he greeted Besso the following day. “I have completely solved the problem.” The trouble with the current conception of the universe, he explained, wasn’t absolute space—or at least wasn’t only absolute space. It was absolute time.
