Scientific Sublime

The sublime evokes our awe our terror and our wonder. Applied first in ancient Greece to the heights of literary expression in the 18th-century the sublime was extended to nature and to the sciences enterprises that viewed the natural world as a manifestation of God's goodness power and wisdom. <p/>In <em>The Scientific Sublime</em> Alan Gross reveals the modern-day sublime in popular science. He shows how the great popular scientists of our time--Richard Feynman Stephen Hawking Steven Weinberg Brian Greene Lisa Randall Rachel Carson Stephen Jay Gould Steven Pinker Richard Dawkins and E. O. Wilson--evoke the sublime in response to fundamental questions: How did the universe begin? How did life? How did language? These authors maintain a tradition initiated by Joseph Addison Edmund Burke Immanuel Kant and Adam Smith towering 18th-century figures who adapted the literary sublime first to nature then to science--though with one crucial difference: religion has been replaced wholly by science. <p/>In a final chapter Gross explores science's attack on religion an assault that attempts to sweep permanently under the rug two questions science cannot answer: What is the meaning of life? What is the meaning of the good life?<br>