Big Ideas - Gibelyou, Cameron

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Résumé :
Big Ideas: A Guide to the History of Everything narrates the history of the universe, Earth, life, and humanity while analyzing how grand stories about the past, present, and future are crafted and framed. In Big Ideas, authors Cameron Gibelyou and Douglas Northrop create a novel framework for thinking about the history and future of everything. They grapple throughout the book with issues at the intersection of the natural sciences, history, literature, philosophy, religion, and the humanities. In nine elegantly written chapters, they attempt to make a reasoned analysis of worldviews that underlie historical writing across many fields. Throughout the course of their broad and deep explorations, the authors bring a wide range of voices to bear on fascinating questions of where everything--from the universe as a whole to any particular thing within it--came from, how it got to be the way it is today, and where things might be headed in the future. Big Ideas invites readers to think about genuinely big questions carefully and rigorously, separating received narratives about the history of everything from the basic facts discovered by scientific and historical study. The book treats scientific explanation and humanistic interpretation as partners: inviting those with primarily scientific interests into a humanistic discussion about science and history, and encouraging those with core interests in the humanities into a discussion of how humanities-based ways of thinking might connect with and apply to the natural sciences. This engagement helps readers learn a basic narrative of the history of everything while constantly provoking thought about big questions and the field of Big History....

Biographie:
Cameron Gibelyou is a faculty member at the University of Michigan, where he develops and teaches original, innovative multidisciplinary courses, including Popular Science, Predicting the Future, and Tours of the Past. He has taught Big History at both the high-school and college levels and serves as science advisor and teacher consultant for the Big History Project. His PhD is in physics, with a specialization in astrophysics and cosmology.

Douglas Northrop is Professor of History and Middle East Studies at the University of Michigan, where he teaches world/global and Big History, Central Asian studies, and the history of empire, environment, and culture. His other books include An Imperial World: Empires and Colonies Since 1750 (2013), A Companion to World History (2012), and the prize-winning Veiled Empire: Gender and Power in Stalinist Central Asia (2004). He is now working on a study of natural disasters along the Eurasian frontier....

Sommaire:

• Acknowledgments


• Preface


• About the Authors


• CHAPTER 1: Introduction


• Introduction


• A Brief History of Histories of Everything


• Information and Interpretation


• Themes


• Organization and Layout


• Points and Purposes


• Creation


• A Quick Tour of Ideas About Creation


• Creation Myths and Universal Histories


• Discipline


• The Challenges of Integrating Different Disciplines


• Example: What Counts as an Explanation? Simplicity vs. Complexity


• Integrating the Humanities and Sciences: The Interpretive Level


• Scale


• Sidebar: Powers of Ten


• Space and Time Tell a Story


• Sidebar: We Are Intermediate-Scaled


• Value, Significance, and Scale: Small Matters Too


• CHAPTER 2: Universe


• Universe


• The Size of the Universe


• The Centrality of the Earth


• The Moral Meaning of the Universe


• Defining the Universe


• Big Bang


• The Story


• The Evidence


• Sidebar: The Lithium Problem


• Levels of Confidence


• Gravity


• Gravity in the History of the Universe: Galaxies, Stars, Elements, Planets


• Ideas About Gravity


• Observational Challenges: Dark Matter and Dark Energy


• Sidebar: Unseen Matter and Gravity


• Gravity as a Metaphor


• Entropy


• What Is Entropy?


• Entropy, Order, and Complexity


• Entropy in an Expanding Universe, Past and Future


• Mathematics


• Laws of Physics


• Limitations of Laws


• Laws and Discipline


• Why the Unreasonable Effectiveness?


• Physical Laws and the Nature of Explanations in Physics


• Fine-Tuning


• CHAPTER 3: Earth


• Earth


• Forming the Earth


• Earth as a Planet


• Earth as a Set of Systems


• Earth as Alive


• Plate Tectonics


• The Idea and the Evidence


• Plate Tectonics and the Earth's Interior


• Sidebar: Does Plate Tectonics Itself Have a History?


• Shifting the Conceptual Ground


• To Ponder: Plate Tectonics as a Metaphor


• Deep Time


• A Brief History of Earth


• How Do We Know?


• Sidebar: How Did the Moon Form?


• Telling the Story of Deep Time


• To Ponder: The Anthropocene


• Ordering by Separating


• Accretion and Differentiation


• Sedimentation and Isotope Fractionation


• Ordering by Separating, Past and Present


• Reductionism


• What Is Reductionism?


• Scale and (Anti-)Reductionism in Universal Histories


• Contextual Emergence


• To Ponder: Wholes and Parts


• Discipline, Reductionism, and the Overall Shape of Knowledge


• CHAPTER 4: Life


• Life


• Life and Levels of Biological Organization


• Sidebar: Scales of Life


• Life: Discipline and Reductionism


• Sidebar: The Same Entity Can Be Treated at Multiple Levels


• Evolution


• The History of Evolution: Darwin's Time and Before


• Natural Selection


• Modern Evolutionary Synthesis


• Extended Sidebar: Evidence for Evolution


• Evolution as Information, Evolution as Interpretation


• Evolution, Progress, and the Value of Animals


• Evolution, Progress, and the Value of Human Beings