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 acclaimed scientist Richard 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 often is ...
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 acclaimed scientist Richard 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 often is more beautiful than the puzzle, uncovering deeper mysteries. With the wit, insight, and spellbinding prose that have made him a best-selling author, Dawkins takes up the most important and compelling topics in modern science, from astronomy and genetics to language and virtual reality, combining them in a landmark statement of the human appetite for wonder. This is the book Richard Dawkins was meant to write: a brilliant assessment of what science is (and isn't), a tribute to science not because it is useful but because it is uplifting.
We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones. Most people are never going to die because they are never going to be born. The potential people who could have been here in my place but who will in fact never see the light of day outnumber the sand grains of Arabia. Certainly those unborn ghosts include greater poets than Keats, scientists greater than Newton. We know this because the set of possible people allowed by our DNA so amssively exceeds the set of actual people. In the teeth of these stupefying odds it is you and I, in our ordinariness, that are here. (查看原文)
Unlike Moore's law for computers, there is no obvious reason to think that the human brain will go on swelling. In order for this to happen, large-brained individuals have to have more children than small-brained individuals. It isn't obvious that this is now happening. It must have happened during our ancestral past, otherwise our brains would not have grown as they did. It also must have been true, incidentally, that braininess in our ancestors was under genetic control. If it had not been, natural selection would have had nothing to work on, and the evolutionary growth of the brain would not have occurred. For some reason, many people take grave political offense at the suggestion that some individuals are genetically clearer than others. But this must have been the case when our brains... (查看原文)
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左其盛
中信出版社2017版
见识城邦
中信出版社2017版
李格非
上海科技教育出版社2001版
0 有用 狼藉者の徒然 2013-05-15 08:32:59
相當科普的一本書。不過做基本瞭解還是蠻有趣的。
0 有用 小索 2024-01-12 02:27:48 意大利
《风格感觉》的扩展阅读：是本着学习非创意写作手法的目的去读的。
0 有用 王的天 2013-09-03 18:39:23
一本引用了很多诗歌的科普作品
0 有用 wangluart 2016-09-03 11:12:18
今年看过最畅快的一本书。讲光色声到基因和进化，讲诗歌和物理的交织，文理转换，所以节奏很舒服。除了部分关于基因的章节枯燥难啃，其余的引人入胜让人停不下来。ps：大量的专业名词其实不重要建议略过不要查字典。