Higher Speculations

Throughout history, people have tried to construct 'theories of everything': highly ambitious attempts to understand nature in its totality. This account presents these theories in their historical contexts, from little known hypotheses from the past to modern developments such as the theory of superstrings, the anthropic principle and ideas of many universes, and uses them to problematize the limits of scientific knowledge. Do claims to theories of everything belong to science at all? Which are the epistemic standards on which an alleged scientific theory of the universe - or the multiverse - is to be judged? Such questions are currently being discussed by physicists and cosmologists, but rarely within a historical perspective. This book argues that these questions have a history and that knowledge of the historical development of 'higher speculations' may inform and qualify the current debate of the nature and limits of scientific explanation.

ISBN 0199599882   Pages 416 ISBN13 9780199599882 (What's this?)   Weight (grammes) 954 Publisher Oxford University Press   Published in Oxford Imprint Oxford University Press   Height (mm) 247 Format Hardback   Width (mm) 176 Publication date 06 Jan 2011   Spine width (mm) 26 DEWEY 501   Academic level Undergraduate, Postgraduate, Professional / Scholarly DEWEY edition DC22

1. Beginnings of Modern Science; 2. A Victorian Theory of Everything; 3. Electrodynamics as a World View; 4. Rationalist Cosmologies; 5. Cosmology and Controversy; 6. The Rise and Fall of the Bootstrap Programme; 7. Varying Constants of Nature; 8. New Cyclic Models of The Universe; 9. The Anthropic Principle; 10. Multiverse Scenarios; 11. String Theory and Other Models of Quantum Gravity; 12. Astrobiology and Physical Eschatology; 13. Summary: Final Theories and Epistemic Shifts

 Be the first to write a customer review