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Brave New Worldview
| Article
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10525 |
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BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
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2 / 1986 |
1,750 Words |
| Author
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Walter R. Hearn
Walter R. Hearn is adjunct professor of science at New
College, Berkeley, California, and newsletter editor of the
American Scientific Affiliation. He has a Ph.D. in
biochemistry from the University of Illinois and taught for
many years at Iowa State University. |
THE NEW STORY OF SCIENCE
Mind and the Universe
Robert M. Augros and George N. Stanciu
Chicago: Gateway Editions, 1984.
234 pp.
"Story" in The New Story of Science means "a cosmic world view." The authors, a philosopher and a physicist, borrow that usage from cultural historian Thomas Berry (The New Story, 1978). The New Story of their title begins with a series of twentieth-century revolutions--in physics (Einstein, Bohr, Heisenberg), neuroscience (Sherrington, Eccles, Sperry, Penfield), psychology (Frankl, Maslow, May), and cosmology (the Big Bang and the Anthropic Principle). The Old Story from which the new is liberating the world is scientific materialism.
Vastness, unity, and light are requisites of a world view, say the authors. Is theirs able to address the remarkable range of topics in this small book? Well, they tell a good story.
They quickly dispatch the Old Story from science (which they tend to equate with physics). Special relativity and quantum mechanics have overthrown Newtonian explanations of the physical universe, inadequate because Newtonian explanations are restricted to the categories of matter, space, and time. Scientists are henceforth compelled to recognize their role as participants rather than passive observers. Consciousness must be taken into account in formulating the laws of quantum mechanics; the death-knell of materialism has been sounded. All that, in seven pages devoted to Matter.
Mind (the new building block of science along with matter and physical laws) gets a longer treatment. Sensation, the human intellect, and human will are shown to be dependent on physics and chemistry but not reducible to them. Wilder Penfield's experiments on brain stimulation are described. Various physicists and neuroscientists testify that free will exists, that mind is not the same thing as the brain.
The third chapter is on beauty, since "all of the most eminent physicists agree that beauty is the primary standard for scientific truth," taking primacy, the authors claim, even over experiment. The elements of beauty recognized by physicists are simplicity, harmony, and brilliance. The old physics could not recognize those elements as laws of nature. Part of the New Story, on the other hand, is a unity between
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