The Ascent Of Jacob Bronowski

THE FIRST-EVER BIOGRAPHY OF JACOB BRONOWSKI--ONE OF THE LEADING SCIENCE POPULARIZERS OF HIS GENERATION. Best remembered today for his blockbuster documentary series The Ascent of Man, Jacob Bronowski spent decades explaining scientific ideas to laypersons on television and radio. A true Renaissance man, Bronowski was not only a scientist, but a philosopher and a poet. In this first-ever biography, author Timothy Sandefur examines the extraordinary accomplishments and fascinating range of thought of this brilliant man. As Sandefur documents, the extent of Bronowki's interests and achievements is staggering. He revolutionized the study of William Blake, invented smokeless coal, and proved Australopithecus africanus was a relative of humans. He was a close friend of Leo Szilard (inventor of the atomic bomb) and William Empson (the prominent poet). He won the British equivalent of an Emmy for a radio play he wrote, sparked the "Two Cultures" controversy of the 1960s, led the mission sent to assess the effects of the atomic bomb at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and cofounded the Salk Institute for Biological Studies with Jonas Salk. A marvelously eloquent and compelling speaker, Bronowski spent the last half of his life teaching the possibilities of humanism, freedom, science, and peace. This thoroughly researched and eloquently written biography will spark renewed interest in one of the great public intellectuals of the twentieth century

Traces the development of science and the discoveries that have made man unique among animal species.

Traces the development of thought through historical movements and periods from 1500 to 1830.

Jacob Bronowski truly educated an enormous number of members of that diffuse population usually referred to, with a hint of condescension, as "educated laymen" through his widely shared television series on the concepts of science and through such highly regarded books as The Identity of Manand The Ascent of Man.This volume extends the process to a further level of insight, and it may be more than suggestive that its final essay is entitled "The Fulfillment of Man." Bronowski was an extraordinary teacher precisely because he did not condescend to his audience. He did not talk down to them; he knew how to talk them up to something near his own level, however briefly. He felt that if human beings are taken seriously, they can be led to respond to serious and difficult subjects that relate to the deepest aspects of nature, both beyond and within themselves. A Sense of the Futuresucceeds brilliantly in this respect, in part because it is a collection of essays that can be read independently as self-contained, delimited presentations; and in part because the book is more than the sum of these individual essays—it is a unified whole in which Bronowski's most abiding concerns are interrelated, juxtaposed, and tested for consistency in various intellectual contexts. The major unifying theme of the work is the intensely creative and human nature of the scientific enterprise—its kinship, at the highest levels of individual achievement, with comparable manifestations of the artistic imagination, and its ethical imperatives, evolved within the community of scientists over the centuries, which both embody and forge the values of civilized life at large. Still, the book's diversity of topics is as striking as the unity of its aim. Among the subjects within the realm of Bronowski's mind that are presented here are the limitations of formal logic and experimental methods, the epistemology of science, the distinctive nature of human language and the human mind, and the bases of biological and cultural evolution. Bronowski also contrasts the findingsof science as the "here and now" of man's understanding with the ongoing activityof science as the open-ended search for truth, and he undertakes to demonstrate that the factual, individual isand the ethical, societal oughtcan be derived each from the other. A mathematician by training, Bronowski published poetry as well as books on literature and intellectual history. In addition to those mentioned above, The Common Sense of Scienceand Science and Human Valuesare among the most widely read of his books. Before his death in 1974, he was for many years a Senior Fellow at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies, where his formal area of research was concerned with the questions of human specificity and uniqueness. Clearly, his interests ranged far beyond this area, and in many directions.

Bronowski was fascinated by William Blake for much of his life. His first book about him, A Man Without a Mask , was published in 1944. In 1958 his famous Penguin selection of Blake's poems and letters was published. As further testimony to Bronowski's enthusiasm it should be noted that the final plate in the book of his great TV series The Ascent of Man is Blake's frontispiece to Songs of Experience . William Blake and the Age of Revolution , first published in 1965, is, in some ways, a revised edition of A Man Without a Mask, in others, a new book. In it Bronowski gives a stimulating interpretation of Blake's art and poetry in the context of the revolutionary period in which he was working. Like all of Bronowski's writings it dazzles with wide-ranging erudition, making this work far removed from conventional literary criticism.

The 10th anniversary edition, with new chapters on the crash, Chimerica, and cryptocurrency "[An] excellent, just in time guide to the history of finance and financial crisis." —The Washington Post "Fascinating." —Fareed Zakaria, Newsweek In this updated edition, Niall Ferguson brings his classic financial history of the world up to the present day, tackling the populist backlash that followed the 2008 crisis, the descent of "Chimerica" into a trade war, and the advent of cryptocurrencies, such as Bitcoin, with his signature clarity and expert lens. The Ascent of Money reveals finance as the backbone of history, casting a new light on familiar events: the Renaissance enabled by Italian foreign exchange dealers, the French Revolution traced back to a stock market bubble, the 2008 crisis traced from America's bankruptcy capital, Memphis, to China's boomtown, Chongqing. We may resent the plutocrats of Wall Street but, as Ferguson argues, the evolution of finance has rivaled the importance of any technological innovation in the rise of civilization. Indeed, to study the ascent and descent of money is to study the rise and fall of Western power itself.

From the revolutionary discoveries of Galileo and Newton to the mind-bending theories of Einstein and Heisenberg, from plate tectonics to particle physics, from the origin of life to universal entropy, and from biology to cosmology, here is a sweeping, readable, and dynamic account of the whole of Western science. In the approachable manner and method of Stephen Jay Gould and Carl Sagan, the late Brian L. Silver translates our most important, and often most obscure, scientific developments into a vernacular that is not only accessible and illuminating but also enjoyable. Silver makes his comprehensive case with much clarity and insight; his book aptly locates science as the apex of human reason, and reason as our best path to the truth. For all readers curious about--or else perhaps intimidated by--what Silver calls "the scientific campaign up to now" in his Preface, The Ascent of Science will be fresh, vivid, and fascinating reading.

Essays defending the human claim to have a mind.