Dana Mackenzie
Autore di The Universe in Zero Words: The Story of Mathematics as Told through Equations
Sull'Autore
Dana Mackenzie is a frequent contributor to Science, Discover, and New Scientist, and writes the biennial series What's Happening in the Mathematical Sciences for the American Mathematical Society. In 2012, he received the prestigious Communications Award from the Joint Policy Board for mostra altro Mathematics. He has a PhD in mathematics from Princeton and was a mathematics professor for thirteen years before becoming a full-time writer. mostra meno
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- Sesso
- male
- Nazionalità
- USA
- Istruzione
- Princeton University
- Attività lavorative
- writer
editor - Premi e riconoscimenti
- George Pólya Award (1993)
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Premi e riconoscimenti
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- Opere
- 8
- Opere correlate
- 2
- Utenti
- 231
- Popolarità
- #97,643
- Voto
- 3.8
- Recensioni
- 5
- ISBN
- 20
- Lingue
- 5
Moreover, the sheer size and visibility of the Apollo program revived lunar science when it had fallen out of favor with the scientific mainstream and was ebbing.
If the philosophy behind "Cosmos" has become the new, mainstream view of science, "The Big Splat" differs from it in at least one more important way. It does not rely greatly on the common theme of science-versus-religion (though that theme does appear). Science is presented as having its own fashions and dogmas, such as the onetime disinclination to take lunar science seriously, and the widespread prejudice against theories proposing large-scale impacts. The chief prejudice is one against lifeless planets: in the author's words, scientists as well as laymen had always proposed that there was life on the moon because "it was just too hard for the human intellect to grasp a place that was utterly devoid of life."
In Carl Sagan's works, the greatest challenge to the human mind, and the largest opportunity to extend human knowledge, is said to be the possible discovery, by science, of extraterrestrial life. In this book, what is hardest for the human intellect to comprehend is not extraterrestrial life but instead lifelessness: the discovery by Apollo that the moon was and always had been a lifeless body.… (altro)