Catching the Light: The Entwined History of Light and Mind by Arthur Zajonc (Eng

Description: Catching the Light by Arthur Zajonc This work takes the reader on a tour of the nature and significance, both scientific and cultural, of light in our world. It explores the development of scientific theories surrounding light, and provides a history of the mind in the process. FORMAT Paperback LANGUAGE English CONDITION Brand New Publisher Description `This is a most persuasive book on a most important subject. I recommend it highly. Saul Bellow With scholarship and clarity, Arthur Zajonc takes us on an epic journey into scientific history. Yet Catching the Light is not just about science; it is a book of ideas that blends science with literature, religion, philosophy, and morality and tries to answer the question that has mystified humanity from pre-historyto the present day: what is light? Notes Blending science with literature, religion and morality and trying to answer the question : what is light? Covers the history of thought on the subject from ancient philosophical ideas to the modern scientific viewpoint. Author Biography Arthur Zajonc is a Fellow of both the Lindisfarne Association and the Fetzer Institute. As a specialist in quantum physics, he has lectured all over the world and is the recipient of a prestigious 1992 Fulbright scholarship. Review "A small gem of a book, poetic in its style and in its determined conjoining of distant ideas....As crammed with culture as an overcrowded museum storeroom."--James Gleick, The Washington Post"Brilliant....A beautifully composed meditation."--Kirkus Reviews"An amazing synthesis and a joy to read--I have not enjoyed a book so much for a long time....An extraordinary work."--Oliver Sacks, M.D., author of The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat a subject surprisingly clear."Catching the Light is nothing short of a masterpiece. It is at once a riveting story, literate and beautifully precise. What more could one ask for in a marriage between science and art?"--Richard Selzer, author of Down from Troy"A small gem of a book, poetic in its style and in its determined conjoining of distant ideas....As crammed with culture as an overcrowded museum storeroom."--James Gleick, The Washington Post"Brilliant....A beautifully composed meditation."--Kirkus Reviews"An amazing synthesis and a joy to read--I have not enjoyed a book so much for a long time....An extraordinary work."--Oliver Sacks, M.D., author of The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat a subject surprisingly clear."Catching the Light is nothing short of a masterpiece. It is at once a riveting story, literate and beautifully precise. What more could one ask for in a marriage between science and art?"--Richard Selzer, author of Down from Troy Kirkus US Review Brilliant study of the relationship between two fields usually kept miles apart: the physics of light and the metaphysics of the mind. Zajonc (Physics/Amherst College) begins with the curious problem of why blind people usually see only a blur when they first recover their sight. The solution is that "without an inner light, without a formative visual imagination, we are blind." Seeing requires light and understanding. This axiom has revolutionary consequences, for it suggests that our very perception of the world is malleable: If we could see with greater consciousness, we would see - and thus inhabit - a richer cosmos. Zajonc traces this concept as it appears in mythology, science, literature, painting, and the history of ideas from Plato to Einstein. The ancient Greeks, he argues convincingly, did not perceive colors as we do; green was seen as "moist freshness" (e.g., blood was "green"), while blue was seen as "darkness." Why? Because the "antique imagination" differed from ours; perception has evolved through history - and so, too, has our comprehension of light. Euclid saw light geometrically; Robert Grosseteste imagined all matter as condensed light; Newton established optics as a mechanical science; in Plancks quantum mechanics, light maintains its mystery as "a single thing with the universe inside." Zajonc seems equally at ease discoursing on atoms or angels, Zoroaster or relativity. He does so without fudging the science or fuzzing the spirituality, by seeing religion and science as essentially one enterprise, that of "seeing the invisible in the visible." His two masters seem to be Goethe and Rudolf Steiner, both of whom held that, as Zajonc puts it, "it is ourself whom we study in studying light." As our consciousness evolves, new perceptions beckon; in time, we may see that "the natural world around us grows out of the moral world within us." A beautifully composed meditation that sheds new light on the nature of nature itself. (Kirkus Reviews) Long Description In 1910, the surgeons Moreau and LePrince wrote about their successful operation on an eight-year-old boy who had been blind since birth because of cataracts. When the boys eyes were healed they removed the bandages and, waving a hand in front of the childs physically perfect eyes, asked him what he saw. "I dont know," was his only reply. What he saw was only a varying brightness in front of him. However, when allowed to touch the hand as it began to move, hecried out in a voice of triumph, "Its moving!" He could feel it move, but he still needed laboriously to learn to see it move. Light and eyes were not enough to grant him sight. How, then, do we see? Whats the difference between seeing and perception? What is light? From ancient times tothe present, from philosophers to quantum physicists, nothing has so perplexed, so fascinated, so captivated the mind as the elusive definition of light. In Catching the Light, Arthur Zajonc takes us on an epic journey into history, tracing how humans have endeavored to understand the phenomenon of light. Blending mythology, religion, science, literature, and painting, Zajonc reveals in poetic detail the human struggle to identify the vital connection between the outer light of natureand the inner light of the human spirit. He explains the curiousness of the Greeks blue and green "color blindness": Odysseus gazing longingly at the "wine-dark sea"; the use of chloros (green) as the color of honey in Homers Odessey; and Euripides use of the color green to describe the hue of tears andblood. He demonstrates the complexity of perception through the work of Paul Cézanne--the artist standing on the bank of a river, painting the same scene over and over again, the motifs multiplying before his eyes. And Zajonc goes on to show how our quest for an understanding of light, as well as the conclusions we draw, reveals as much about the nature of our own psyche as it does about the nature of light itself. For the ancient Egyptians the nature of light was clear--it simply wasthe gaze of God. In the hands of the ancient Greeks, light had become the luminous inner fire whose ethereal effluence brought sight. In our contemporary world of modern quantum physics, science plays the greatest part in our theories of lights origin--from scientific perspectives such as Sir Isaac Newtons"corpuscular theory of light" and Michael Faradays "lines of force" to such revolutionary ideas as Max Plancks "discrete motion of a pendulum" (the basis of quantum mechanics), Albert Einsteins "particles of light" and "theory of relativity," and Niels Bohrs "quantum jumps." Yet the metaphysical aspects of the scientific search, Zajonc shows, still loom large. For the physicist Richard Feynman, a quantum particle travels all paths, eventually distilling to one path whose action isleast--the most beautiful path of all. Whatever light is, here is where we will find it. With rare clarity and unmatched lyricism, Zajonc illuminates the profound implications of the relationships between the multifaceted strands of human experience and scientific endeavor. A fascinating searchinto our deepest scientific mystery, Catching the Light is a brilliant synthesis that will both entertain and inform. Review Text "A small gem of a book, poetic in its style and in its determined conjoining of distant ideas....As crammed with culture as an overcrowded museum storeroom."--James Gleick, The Washington Post"Brilliant....A beautifully composed meditation."--Kirkus Reviews"An amazing synthesis and a joy to read--I have not enjoyed a book so much for a long time....An extraordinary work."--Oliver Sacks, M.D., author of The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat a subject surprisingly clear."Catching the Light is nothing short of a masterpiece. It is at once a riveting story, literate and beautifully precise. What more could one ask for in a marriage between science and art?"--Richard Selzer, author of Down from Troy"A small gem of a book, poetic in its style and in its determined conjoining of distant ideas....As crammed with culture as an overcrowded museum storeroom."--James Gleick, The Washington Post"Brilliant....A beautifully composed meditation."--Kirkus Reviews"An amazing synthesis and a joy to read--I have not enjoyed a book so much for a long time....An extraordinary work."--Oliver Sacks, M.D., author of The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat a subject surprisingly clear."Catching the Light is nothing short of a masterpiece. It is at once a riveting story, literate and beautifully precise. What more could one ask for in a marriage between science and art?"--Richard Selzer, author of Down from Troy Review Quote "Catching the Light is nothing short of a masterpiece. It is at once ariveting story, literate and beautifully precise. What more could one ask for ina marriage between science and art?"--Richard Selzer, author of Down fromTroy Details ISBN0195095758 Author Arthur Zajonc Short Title CATCHING THE LIGHT Language English ISBN-10 0195095758 ISBN-13 9780195095753 Media Book Format Paperback Year 1995 Subtitle The Entwined History of Light and Mind Residence Kalamazoo, MI, US Affiliation Amherst College, MA DOI 10.1604/9780195095753 UK Release Date 1995-10-05 AU Release Date 1995-10-05 NZ Release Date 1995-10-05 US Release Date 1995-10-05 Illustrations halftones, line drawings Illustrator Layn Marlow Edited by James J. Fawcett Birth 1797 Death 1851 Position Former Professor of International Commerical Law Qualifications PhD Imprint Oxford University Press Place of Publication Oxford Country of Publication United Kingdom Publisher Oxford University Press Publication Date 1995-10-05 DEWEY 535 Audience General Pages 400 We've got this At The Nile, if you're looking for it, we've got it. 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