Book Description

Taking our present ignorance of science and technology as a symptom of profound cultural malaise, writer and physicist Joseph Schwartz offers a provocative and fascinating look back into the history of science to find out how it progressively lost touch with the rest of society. Acting as a sort of science critic, Schwartz examines a range of great "creative moments", from seventeenth-century Florence and Galileo (whose decision to describe his theories in mathematical language avoided trouble with the Church, but began the trend to number-worship in physics) to Cold Spring Harbor in 1946 and the invention of molecular biology, which ultimately fostered a way of thinking so restrictive that it may now be imperiling the search for an AIDS cure. Why Einstein's relativity theory is so famously arcane, when it ought not to be....Why the bomb-makers of Los Alamos allowed themselves to be manipulated by the military....Why physicists have come up with almost no new ideas since the 1920s....These are the kinds of questions The Creative Moment tackles and illuminates with a freshness and knowledgeability that is the hallmark of a truly new approach to understanding science and technology.