Book Description

Towards a Final Story is the first history of the modern scientific epic. These epic stories pull together our knowledge of the universe, uniting material and biological origins, from beginning to end. The authors of these epics--among them Carl Sagan, E.O. Wilson, and Steven Weinberg--saw their task as providing an integrated schema that would not only bring together but also go beyond the particular scientific results and disciplines available as they wrote their histories. Nasser Zakariya traces how such epic stories could achieve what they claimed, how they inhabit culture and politics, and how they arrived at the present moment from a period in the previous century when inquiries into ultimate origins were regarded by many as unscientific and unanswerable. These prominent, popular historical narratives of science are important forms of knowledge in their own right. They expose what science means in the wider culture and at the same time focus attention on the near paradoxical nature of a universal history narrated by humanity for humanity.