A Final Story ：Science, Myth, and Beginnings

Publication subTitle ：Science, Myth, and Beginnings

Author： Nasser Zakariya  

Publisher： University of Chicago Press‎

Publication year： 2017

E-ISBN: 9780226500737

P-ISBN(Paperback): 9780226476124

Subject： N02 Elements of the Philosophy of Science

Keyword： 自然科学总论

Language： ENG

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Description

Popular science readers embrace epics—the sweeping stories that claim to tell the history of all the universe, from the cosmological to the biological to the social. And the appeal is understandable: in writing these works, authors such as E. O. Wilson or Steven Weinberg deliberately seek to move beyond particular disciplines, to create a compelling story weaving together natural historical events, scientific endeavor, human discovery, and contemporary existential concerns.

In A Final Story, Nasser Zakariya delves into the origins and ambitions of these scientific epics, from the nineteenth century to the present, to see what they reveal about the relationship between storytelling, integrated scientific knowledge, and historical method. While seeking to transcend the perspectives of their own eras, the authors of the epics and the debates surrounding them are embedded in political and social struggles of their own times, struggles to which the epics in turn respond. In attempts to narrate an approach to a final, true account, these synthesizing efforts shape and orient scientific developments old and new. By looking closely at the composition of science epics and the related genres developed along with them, we are able to view the historical narrative of science as a form of knowledge itself, one that discloses much about the development of our understanding of and relationship to science over time.

Chapter

Contents

Introduction

Part I

1. Varieties of Natural History: The Whole of the Natural and the Known

2. Dogmas of Unity and Questions of Expertise

3. The Many Faces of Force and the Mutability of Energy

4. Schisms

Part II

5. Undoing and Reassembling Scales and Histories

6. Other Emerging Genres of Synthesis: From the Fabulaic to the Foundational

7. Humanisms, Nuclear Histories, and Nuclear Ages

8. Scientific Myth and Mysticism

Part III

9. Scientific Tribes and Totalizing Myths

10. Cosmos and the Structure of “Epic Myth”

11. Political Cosmologies

12. A New Version of Genesis

Coda: Epic Humanisms

Acknowledgments

Notes

Index

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