Word: bronowsky
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...BRONOWSKI...
...years ago, Jacob Bronowski, a Polish-born, English-educated mathematician, historian and biologist, traced man's scientific development in a widely acclaimed 13-part BBC television series, The Ascent of Man, which will reach U.S. TV audiences next season. Now he has adapted his scripts into a book. The result is a long (100,000 words), fascinating, beautifully illustrated essay about the qualities of curiosity, imagination and inventiveness that lead man to explore the world and the invisible laws that order it. The book is also an exercise in optimism. With so many scientists predicting that humanity will destroy...
...Bronowski begins in the Great Rift Valley of Africa where, it is believed, the creature that was to become man first put his footprints on the earth. The book ends in the 20th century at the same location with Bronowski's fearful, yet hopeful look into the future. In between he leads the way through a catalogue of human accomplishment, from Pythagoras on the mathematical laws that govern the universe to the revolutionary observations of Ptolemy, Copernicus and Galileo; from Newton's experiments on the diffraction of light to James Watson and Francis Crick's discovery...
...Bronowski often bridges the gap between the two cultures, discoursing on everything from the Mona Lisa to the construction of Rheims Cathedral. He demonstrates how the flowering of art and architecture was a natural out growth of expanding knowledge in mathematics and the rules of perspective. Bronowski also corrects the popular notion that the Industrial Revolution simply forced man to give up rural pleasures for urban horrors. This revolution, he points out, freed man from age-old social strictures, creating a new aristocracy of talent...
...faith in the possibilities of the future, it is small wonder that an electric atmosphere pervaded the whole of science in 1960. "I could have lived in no other age in which so intoxicating and beautiful a series of discoveries could have been made," breathes British Mathematician Jacob Bronowski. "If I have any regrets at the thought of dying, it is that we live in so explosive a time that discoveries will continue to be made that I will know nothing about...