I first experienced a global shift in perception and how we see the world—an epistemological break—as a young man being captured by the youth rebellion of the Sixties—60 years ago. It revolutionized the way we perceived the world around us, how we interpreted it, how we communicated. Our language became music; our music became language. I started to write. Right now, another epistemological break is on its way. It has two roots: first, the conservative backlash against emancipatory movements and democracy since 1980. Second, the tremendous advances of technology and its impact on perception, interpretation, and communication. After decades as a scientist, I still write. Building on René Descartes—"cogito ergo sum"—I confess: scribo ergo sum.
I am curious. What catches my attention are those sudden, highly surprising new combinations of existing knowledge, which I have not been aware of so far.
Though I have not studied particle physics, I always thought that the quantum mechanisms entail mysteries that still wait to be discovered by interpreting them. Maybe by applying a new formal language. As a fan of Spinoza, I am convinced that life, mankind, is all nature and might be explained with a similar toolset as non-living systems. I invented a research project called "Quantum Political Economy." It got stuck.
Then I encountered this book on "Quantum Biology." It is a marvelous attempt to take the first steps towards an epistemological break in our understanding of how we could frame what happens in the brains of living subjects.
Life is the most extraordinary phenomenon in the known universe; but how does it work? Even in this age of cloning and synthetic biology, the remarkable truth remains: nobody has ever made anything living entirely out of dead material. Life remains the only way to make life. Are we missing a vital ingredient in its creation?
Like Richard Dawkins' The Selfish Gene, which provided a new perspective on evolution, Life on the Edge alters our understanding of life's dynamics as Jim Al-Khalili and Johnjoe Macfadden reveal the hitherto missing ingredient to be quantum mechanics. Drawing on recent ground-breaking experiments around…
I adore the political attitude of this famous leading researcher in quantum theory.
Of course, he knows better than the general public how severe a global nuclear conflict will endanger the survival of the human species. And of course, he had to endure a broad wave of criticism from colleagues who rather shied away when asked to warn of a new escalating armament race. "This is not our business," was their recommendation.
But Carlo Rovelli always was after truth and wrote a book that fascinates me. His books pave the way not only to understand space and time in a new way, but also to combine the clear argument of natural science with humanist goals. With them, an epistemological break is on its way.
A warning to humankind from one of the world’s greatest physicists'What drives these pages is the guilty conscience of my profession, theoretical physics. My sole aim is to help avert what seems to me to be the unintended, yet scarcely avoidable, end point of the current politics of the governments we have elected: nuclear war.'The world is rearming and embroiled in endless conflict. The Doomsday Clock has now been set to 85 seconds to midnight, with the risk of nuclear war the highest it has ever been. Why do we always fail to learn from the past?In this urgent book,…
Set in the exotic and romantic realm of international rare bookselling, this is a story about protecting the written word against a digital world threatening to destroy it.
Michael Ashe, a young Los Angeles bookseller, must confront the fact that his once-thriving business is collapsing. Reading is in decline. Refusing…
For me, Sheila Rowbotham is one of the central authors representing the epistemological break that I was experiencing as a teenager in the Sixties.
She describes her involvement in the intellectual wars of the time as well as her everyday involvement in lust and tears. I love her book; for me, it is indeed a promise. She represents the left-progressive feminism, which at the time was fully integrated into this broader wave of emancipatory movements.
Nevertheless, it is not all pure praise; Rowbotham’s critical view of her generation anticipates what turned out to destroy the youth revolt in the following decades. It is a promise on which learning as well as optimism can follow.
Promise of a Dream is a moving, witty and poignant recollection of a time when young women were breaking all the rules about sex, politics and their place in the world. Sheila Rowbotham, best known for A Century of Women, Threads Through Time and Hidden From History, turns her hand here to memoir. The result is a wryly amusing account of her younger self, and a sparkling portrait of the exhilaration and enthusiasm of the sixties.
Umberto Eco is a prophet for the rising the epistemological break that we are approaching.
In this collection of essays, he anticipates how a rising dark age forces progressive scientific circles to retreat into secret monasteries to survive and to preserve valid older knowledge. As a historian specialized in the Middle Ages, he knows what he talks about.
But he also provides a revolution in the style and content of what he writes: Short essays that connect everyday life experiences of the young generation of the Sixties with his art of deriving theoretical – even witty - abstractions. This is semiotics (a scientific field he developed) at its best, and I love it.
“A scintillating collection of writings by one of the most influential thinkers of our times.” —Los Angeles Times
With the same wit, learning, and lively intelligence that delighted readers of The Name of the Rose and Foucault's Pendulum, Umberto Eco entertains and intrigues once again, this time on subjects ranging from pop culture to philosophy, from the People's Temple to Thomas Aquinas, from Casablanca to Roland Barthes. Acute, ironic, and often very funny, these timeless essays open up fresh worlds of possibility and new frameworks of existence. A classic work.
“Eco combines scholarship with a love of paradox and a…
From Pulitzer Finalist Laurie Sheck (A Monster's Notes), a new speculative literary fiction in the spirit of Italo Calvino, Umberto Ecco and Donna Haraway's Cyborg Manifesto that enacts an incisive and moving exploration into what it means to be human in the age of AI and increasing inhumanism.
I love this book because it opened up doors in my mind, which I did not know they exist.
For a long time, I thought that I had a split set of ambitions. On one side, I was fascinated by mathematics and its connection to theoretical physics. On the other side, I was drawn to art, to live as part of the community of artists.
With this book, Marcus de Sautoy showed me in detail how art did pave the way to formal theoretical innovations, how my two sides are the same stupefying property of human exploratory understanding. To trust in this property of the human species is an elementary ingredient for the optimism needed to master the upcoming epistemological break!
*A Financial Times and Waterstones Book of the Year 2025*
Many artists are unaware of the mathematics that bubble beneath their craft, while some consciously use it for inspiration. Our instincts might tell us that these two subjects are incompatible forces with nothing in common, but what if we're wrong?
Marcus du Sautoy, acclaimed mathematician and Simonyi Professor for the Public Understanding of Science at the University of Oxford, looks to art, music, design and literature to uncover the key mathematical structures that underpin both human creativity and the natural world.
Think of the opposite of Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea. Think of today's world, of our age of alienation, of the young humans shaping the world in the future. This book attempts to creep into their possible mindsets. It provides a rich panorama of prevalent questions that an educated observer explores in an inner dialogue with his alternating egos. Along this monologue, a shift in language that follows the shift in perception habits occurs.
Part 1 is an inversion of Hemingway’s book. Part 2 then frees itself, digging into overflowing connotations. It draws on lyrics from classic rock, using the contradiction between beat and solo improvisation as a metaphor. Part 3 turns free associations and feelings into the force of political aesthetics.
The end of life is still a forbidden topic. Today, Baby Boomers, the largest population group in American history, are facing death. And nobody wants to talk about it!
Join Brad Stuart, M.D. as he shows how he learned the truth about dying over…
The rediscovery of Aristotle's works by Christians in the libraries of Muslim Spain set off an intellectual and moral revolution in the Roman Catholic Church that, in many ways, launched the modern era. Rubenstein's book tells how a remarkable series of characters, including Peter Abelard, Thomas Aquinas, and William of…
