Labyrinth: A Search for the Hidden Meaning of Science

by Peter Pesic

Nature has secrets, and it is the desire to uncover them that motivates the scientific quest. But what makes these "secrets" secret? Is it that they are beyond human ken? that they concern divine matters? And if they are accessible to human seeking, why do they seem so carefully hidden? Such questions are at the heart of Peter Pesic's enlightening effort to uncover the meaning of modern science.

Pesic portrays the struggle between the scientist and nature as the ultimate game of hide-and-seek, in which a childlike wonder propels the exploration of mysteries. Witness the young Albert Einstein, fascinated by a compass and the sense it gave him of "something deeply hidden behind things." In musical terms, the book is a triple fugue, interweaving three the epic struggle between the scientist and nature; the distilling effects of the struggle on the scientist; and the emergence from this struggle of symbolic mathematics, the purified language necessary to decode nature's secrets.

Pesic's quest for the roots of science begins with three key Renaissance William Gilbert, a physician who began the scientific study of magnetism; FranA§ois ViA¨te, a French codebreaker who played a crucial role in the foundation of symbolic mathematics; and Francis Bacon, a visionary who anticipated the shape of modern science. Pesic then describes the encounters of three modern masters—Johannes Kepler, Isaac Newton, and Albert Einstein—with the depths of nature. Throughout, Pesic reads scientific works as works of literature, attending to nuance and tone as much as to surface meaning. He seeks the living center of human concern as it emerges in the ongoing search for nature's secrets.

Genres: Science, Philosophy, Nonfiction, History Of Science

194 pages, Hardcover

First published May 1, 2000

Reviews

[Danna · Rating 4 out of 5]

So far this reads like someone's graduate thesis or dissertation, yet it's also written conversationally enough to be engaging for the lay reader. Pulling in historical perspectives is interesting and engaging, despite the irritating lack of women represented in the author's choices. This, of course, is sadly typical of most academic disciplines and therefore unsurprising.

[Menno Beek · Rating 4 out of 5]

It takes a while to get used to the book, and at first I did not get where this was going, but after some getting used to the circling of the the famous scientist that Pesic does, things become more clear.

He takes some famous people from the scientific revolution, Bacon, Keppler, Newton, and shows how they were emotionally and philosophically involved with science, showing that their personal beliefs and circumstances mattered quite a lot in what they accomplished, and that their place in history was rather important to, for the work they did. Closing the arguments with Einstein, quoting the great man during a boat ride, one sort of gets to understand that for humans to understand the world mathematically, scientifically, is not as straight forward as most people might believe. Pesic writes:

'Educators point out that people still think of the world in Aristotelian terms, despite centuries of post-Newtonian physics, [..] Ordinary intuition is at odds with newton'

And there's a lot to learn from this short book along the way: how Bacon suggested that it's not a coincidence that the man answering the old riddle of the Sphinx was a handicapped man, outside normal patters of thinking. Stuff like that.