The Earth: From Myths to Knowledge

by Hubert Krivine, David Fernbach (Translator)

How mankind discovered the size, trajectory and age of the Earth

Our planet’s elliptical orbit around the Sun and its billions-of-years existence are facts we take for granted, matters every literate high school student is expected to grasp. But humanity’s struggle towards these scientific truths lasted millennia. Few of us have more than the faintest notion of the path we have travelled.

Hubert Krivine tells the story of the thinkers and scientists whose work allowed our species to put an age to the planet and pinpoint our place in the solar system. It is a history of bold innovators, with a broad cast of contributors – not only Copernicus, Galileo and Kepler, but Halley, Kelvin, Darwin and Rutherford, among many others. Courage, iniquity, religious dogmatism, genius and blind luck all played a part.

This was an epic struggle to free the mind from the constraints of cant, ideology and superstition. From this history, Krivine delineates an invaluable philosophy of science, one today under threat from irrationalism and the fundamentalist movements of East and West, which threaten both what we have attained at great cost and what we still have to learn.

Scientific progress is not a sufficient condition for social progress; but it is a necessary one. The Earth is not merely a history of scientific learning, but a stirring defence of Enlightenment values in the quest for human advancement.

Genres: Science, History, Religion

304 pages, Hardcover

First published March 31, 2015

Reviews

[Kaelan Ratcliffe ▪ كايِلان راتكِليف · Rating 4 out of 5]

Why Truth Matters

This is a difficult book to pin down. As to why this is the case remains more of a mystery; at least to me. Having just finished it today, I'm uncertain as to whether my lack of scientific understanding is the main reason for not fully engaging with this book, or whether it was me taking a few weeks break from it, or perhaps the authors - Hubert Krivine - method of segmenting the topics within the books pages. Either way, I don't feel I'm in a good position to fully judge whether others of an unscientific background should read this. Mr. Krivine certainly makes a point of suggesting those without scientific knowledge can read The Earth well enough, as he himself made special effort to make it so when writing it. I agree with this for at least the first third of the book.

The title seems straight forward enough, yet this is a crammed text for 165 pages. I don't wish to bog the review down hacking away at each section, so here's a brief summary:

PART ONE: EARTH'S AGE

1 ‘Pre Science'
2 The Beginning of the Modern Age
3 The Twentieth Century and Radioactivity

Easily the most readable part of the book. I found myself thoroughly engaged at this stage.

PART TWO: EARTH'S MOVEMENT

4 Before Copernicus
5 The Construction of Heliocentrism
6 Distances
7 The Battle over Heliocentrism

The book takes a turn into combining a chronological history of our understanding of earth movements, with a bit of scientific information thrown in. This is especially true of the chapter on distances, which I eventually skipped entirely as I simply could not understand the equations.

PART THREE: 'ONLY’ SCIENTIFIC TRUTH?

8 Why Truth Matters

An interesting finish to the book, with a discussion on truth within the scientific field, and what it means to the world, and religion.

I feel the introduction by Tariq Ali serves as a good taster the reader can expect from this book:

"My first thought on reading Hubert Krivine’s book was that it should be Immedlately translated Into Arabic, Persian, Urdu, Bengali. Behasa. so that it is available to the new generation that is growing up in difficult circumstances throughout the world of Islam. And not only in those regions. It will benefit many European citizens of Muslim origin, who will find in these pages an Open, calm and non-dogmatic interpretation of the origins of this planet and related matters.

. . .That’s why I read "The Earth" as an important intervention that could greatly benefit young Muslims everywhere and help transcend both the bombs and the drones from the sky as well as the obscurantist responses from below. In fact, Krivine’s text is such a powerful antidote to ignorance and stupidity that it deserves to be a textbook in both the Muslim world and the United States. Forgive the utopian digression. Those who determine what is studied in the educational institutions of most Muslim countries today are either scared by the fundamentalist groups who skulk around in the background or have themselves moved in that direction. Who will educate the educators of the One-Book school? The more open-minded among them will find much of value in this study. It’s always better to know what it is that one is disagreeing with."

[Lili · Rating 4 out of 5]

I found this to be one of the most frustrating reads in a while, frustrating because it waffled between being incredibly enjoyable and well written to infuriatingly boring and rambling. Coming from someone who does nothing but ramble endlessly, that is saying something. I think the thing that really frustrated me was the unclear tone of the book, it changed from scientific, to philosophical, to religious in a very disjointed manner. It lacked any real flow.

Now I did really like how the book was using science, philosophy, and religion to make points and show how science evolved from philosophy and religion. I found that using logic and science to explain how religious texts (specifically the Bible) should be used as religion and parables only, not as cold hard facts to describe the way the world works.

From what I gathered from the introduction and from the book itself, it was written to be a teaching tool to people in developing nations, to help them move past reliance on religious dogma as fact and to embrace science. It did an excellent job of not saying religion is wrong, or even that thinking these things laid out in the Bible actually happened, bravo on that! The tone, at times comes off lofty and condescending, but to be honest I am not sure how you would write a book with this very specific goal in mind without sounding that way once in a while.

All in all, I think this is a book worth reading, both from a scientific refresher standpoint and from a philosophical standpoint. It might not be my most favorite book ever, but I did enjoy reading it.

I recieved this book from Netgalley in exchange for a review

[Elizabeth]

As seen on Science Book a Day: http://sciencebookaday.com/2015/08/03...

[Adam · Rating 4 out of 5]

Skip the first and last parts (tired screeds against the spectre of postmodernism) - most of the book is a fascinating history that explains exactly *how* and *why* we know what we know about the Earth.

[Pinko Palest · Rating 2 out of 5]

Very useful as regards the science involved, not all that useful on medieval and early modern scientific beliefs

[Jan Schaller · Rating 2 out of 5]

Kein gutes Buch, irgendwie stilistisch unschön und unnötig kompliziert geschrieben. Vielleicht auch einfach *lost in translsation*, weil der Autor Franzose ist.

[Nancy Reynolds · Rating 5 out of 5]

Alain Krivine's book is remarkably well written and easy to follow, but not quite my thing. I gave the copy that I won from Goodreads to my daughter who is more interested in STEM studies and their histories than I am. That being said, I did read enough to know that the author does have an engrossing writing style that would captivate the interest of any reader interested in the topics he writes on.

[Bob Anderson · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a relatively detailed examination of just a few things in our scientific knowledge: the Earth’s age, the Earth’s size, and the mechanisms of our solar system. Krivine does a meticulous job of showing how various ideas were combined, adapted and invented to take our understanding away from guesses and faith and towards truth. He includes a huge wealth of notes and sources; this detail and his focus help make a really effective book.

[Augusto Delgado · Rating 3 out of 5]

How the earth was discovered by the human race, from the antiquity to the first scientists, reaching heliocentrism overcoming the religious prejudice and ignorance and church backwards politics, even though one too many a scientist/observer tried to obey its shit. Has detailed appendixes on how the earth measurements equations were unveiled.