Cultural Dictionary of Sciences. Art, literature, cinema, sociology, myth, politics, history, humor, religion, ethics, economics, poetry, popularization.
Threshold| N° d'inventaire | 23144 |
| Format | 24 x 31.5 |
| Détails | 440 p., bound under dust jacket. |
| Publication | Paris, 2001 |
| Etat | Nine |
| ISBN | 9782841051281 |
This is not a dictionary of science. It is a "dictionary," certainly, but one that begins with absinthe and ends with Zoroaster... And if it does deal with "science," it is certainly not that of scientists and school or university textbooks, the kind that must be popularized on the pretext that it is inaccessible. This is a collection of a good thousand articles, the result of 97 cross-examinations on what, in science, its history, its people, its places, its ideas - and especially around it, in its contacts with art, literature, economics, politics, or religion, seemed likely to interest the Homo sapiens sapiens of the 21st century. The most complete freedom of tone is here put at the service of an assiduous search for clarity. All jargon, the ordinary mask of incomprehension, has been mercilessly banished, as have those figures of speech signifying that a scholar is speaking, from the heart of Science, to an ignorant person eager for knowledge. The sciences (all or almost all, and not only Western) are considered here, not from the inside as is customary, but from the outside, from those places where, in contact with other fields of knowledge and culture, they take on their full meaning. The Big Bang of cosmology and the DNA of our cells are there, but poetry and alchemy also have their place; mathematics and molecular biology, but also mesmerism and angels. With the added bonus of usefulness and subtlety, beauty and ignorance, a number of unexpected characters and a few dozen emblematic images of science: reason, even scientific, cannot do without the imagination, nor science without its fiction. This work is dedicated to reconnecting the lost links between science and culture, in the somewhat crazy but essential hope of seeing science, today seriously cut off from what should be "its" public, that is to say each of us, become more intelligible. NW
This is not a dictionary of science. It is a "dictionary," certainly, but one that begins with absinthe and ends with Zoroaster... And if it does deal with "science," it is certainly not that of scientists and school or university textbooks, the kind that must be popularized on the pretext that it is inaccessible. This is a collection of a good thousand articles, the result of 97 cross-examinations on what, in science, its history, its people, its places, its ideas - and especially around it, in its contacts with art, literature, economics, politics, or religion, seemed likely to interest the Homo sapiens sapiens of the 21st century. The most complete freedom of tone is here put at the service of an assiduous search for clarity. All jargon, the ordinary mask of incomprehension, has been mercilessly banished, as have those figures of speech signifying that a scholar is speaking, from the heart of Science, to an ignorant person eager for knowledge. The sciences (all or almost all, and not only Western) are considered here, not from the inside as is customary, but from the outside, from those places where, in contact with other fields of knowledge and culture, they take on their full meaning. The Big Bang of cosmology and the DNA of our cells are there, but poetry and alchemy also have their place; mathematics and molecular biology, but also mesmerism and angels. With the added bonus of usefulness and subtlety, beauty and ignorance, a number of unexpected characters and a few dozen emblematic images of science: reason, even scientific, cannot do without the imagination, nor science without its fiction. This work is dedicated to reconnecting the lost links between science and culture, in the somewhat crazy but essential hope of seeing science, today seriously cut off from what should be "its" public, that is to say each of us, become more intelligible. NW