![]() ![]() These are sentences formed by a mind that can compose imagery, and then select exactly the right words to represent the image. Every carbon atom in every living creature has been formed by such a wildly improbable collision." There is a new architecture here, a way that things are put together which we cannot know: we only try to picture it by analogy, a new act of imagination."Īnd the Bronowski imagination dances on, leading us to new insights: he talks about the fabrication of the 92 elements through stellar fusion from the universal raw material of hydrogen and pauses, just for a moment, to contemplate carbon "formed in a star whenever three helium nuclei collide at one spot within less than a million millionth of a second. in a world which our senses cannot experience. Ultimately, his journey leads him "through the gateway of the atom. ![]() Geometry, and Greek and Islamic experiments in mathematics, began to expose the importance of shape, distance, perspective and to reveal a vision of the universe "not as a series of static frames but as a moving process". This same attitude helps him demonstrate that the hit-and-miss handiwork of the Bronze Age, the intricate craftsmanship of Samurai swordsmiths, and the not-quite-futile endeavours of the medieval alchemists, were all tentative explorations of the invisible nature of matter. He identifies the keen edge of a stone blade, the baked bricks of Sumer, the marble of Greece and the stone arches of Rome, as evidence of human exploration of the visible structure of matter. It is an illustration of his ability to stand just slightly off-centre, to see the unexpected in the familiar, and select imagery that has life, action, movement. That is more than just an example of the Bronowski way with words. The most powerful drive in the ascent of man is pleasure in his own skill." ![]() He also had a gift for sentences minted with precision, and Dawkins picks out two of them in his foreword: "The hand is the cutting edge of the mind. Bronowski had a gift for identifying the themes and advances that would seem just as vital 40 years on. "A spoken argument is informal and heuristic it singles out the heart of the matter and shows in what way it is crucial and new," he writes in his own foreword.īut the enduring freshness stems from something else. Some of the fluency stems from Bronowski's decision to put as much of the script for the TV series into the book as possible. Some of the fluency stems from Bronowski's greedy enthusiasm for intellectual adventure, including poetry (I still have his 1972 book William Blake and the Age of Revolution, and felicitously, a new scholarly monograph from Imprint Academic, The Happy Passion by Antony James, tells us a lot more about Bronowski's output). It proceeds briskly through what is by now the standard science-oriented western European version of human history – the Palaeolithic, the dawn of civilisation, the Greeks and the Romans, the Islamic empire, Galileo, Newton, the Industrial Revolution, Mendeleev, Pasteur, Darwin, Einstein and the nuclear age – and it still seems as good as any other history of discovery, and a great deal sharper and more readable than some. But it doesn't – not, at least, to this reader. ![]()
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