The Search for the Absolute - Williams, Jeffrey H.

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Résumé :
History and archaeology tell us that when our far ancestors began to settle in localized groups, they codified their lives and experiences, and formed a collective for mutual support. This proto-civilization would have arisen from each individual?s questions about the world, and their attempt to understand themselves and their place in the world. These groups, or tribes, evolved rules of conduct to facilitate communal living, and made a calendar for the group?s celebration of harvests, and other events upon which the group was utterly dependent. This process of social evolution is the origin of religion, and of a magical way of looking at Nature. Eventually, this developing worldview was also the origin of science, which is our investigation of Nature to understand something of what is happening around us, and to use this knowledge to ensure our survival in a violent, indifferent Universe. After all, science and religion seek to answer the same question: Why and how isthe natural world the way it is? This book seeks to show how science evolved from religion and magic, in response to a need to understand Nature.

Biographie:
Jeffrey H. Williams was born in Swansea, UK, in 1956. He attended the University College of Wales, Aberystwyth and Cambridge University, being awarded a Ph.D. in chemical physics from the University of Cambridge in 1981. Subsequently, his career as a research scientist was in the physical sciences. First, as a research scientist in the universities of Cambridge, Oxford, Harvard, and Illinois, and subsequently as an experimental physicist at the Institute Laue-Langevin, Grenoble, which remains one of the world's leading centers for research involving neutrons, especially, neutron scattering and diffraction. During this research career, the author pub-lished more than seventy technical papers and invited review articles in the peer-reviewed literature. However, after much thought, the author chose to leave research in 1992 and moved to the world of science publishing and the communication of science by becoming the European editor for the physical sciences for the AAAS's Science. Subsequently, the author was Assistant Executive Secretary of the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry...