Nature's Imagination: The Frontiers of Scientific Vision

by John Cornwell

"A person is not explainable in molecular, field-theoretical, or physiological terms alone." With that declaration, Nobel laureate Gerald M. Edelman goes straight to the heart of Nature's Imagination, a vibrant and important collection of essays by some of the world's foremost scientists. Ever since the Enlightenment, the authors write, science has pursued reductionism: the idea that the whole can be understood by examining and explaining each of...

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0198517750
• ISBN13: 9780198517757
• Release Date: March 1995
• Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
• Length: 224 Pages
• Weight: 1.20 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.9" x 6.3" x 9.5"

Customer Reviews

A balanced selection

From the anthropomorphic title of this book, you might expect it to be a anti-reductionist tract - and in part you would be right. However it also represents the views of some scientists/mathematicians who are certainly reductionists.Almost all of the essays are deep, and some are difficult. However with the exception of Edelman's first contribution which is pretty well incomprehensible I understood the gist of most of the contributions. Edelman's essay benefits from a translation into something more digestible by a piece by Oliver Sacks.Many of these writings are very stimulating and presented very didactically. In particular I enjoyed Peter Atkins' robust defence of reductionism, perhaps because I recall his style from his quantum chemistry lectures 20 years ago. However Atkins' proselytization for his position is almost religious in its intensity, and his certainty also seems to have elements of faith about it.At the end of the book I felt reasonably persuaded by the anti-reductionists' arguments. This represents a shift of view for me, so in that sense it was a powerful book.It's worth reading.