THE PROPHET AND THE ASTRONOMER

Polymath Gleiser (Natural Philosophy, Physics, and Astronomy/Dartmouth) puts his eclectic résumé to good use in this exploration of how religious and scientific views of life and death come together in the skies.

In The Dancing Universe: From Creation Myths to the Big Bang (1997), Gleiser attempted to bridge the gap between the spiritual and the scientific by focusing on how men and women of religion and of the laboratory have explained the origins of the universe to themselves and others. Here, he continues the discussion of whether religion and science can be reconciled, but now Gleiser focuses on endings more than origins. Whether grounded in the spiritual, the scientific, or some of each, humans are driven to understand the passage of time, which always ends in death. A great part of their effort at understanding is directed at the skies, where signs of an apocalyptic end could appear at a moment's notice. Religions wrote down the implications of their sky-watching in books, including the Christian Bible. Those accounts, such as the Revelation to John (“its inclusion in the New Testament was a very controversial issue in the early church”), became so much a part of individual heritage that they inevitably influenced scientific thought. Gleiser surveys the intersection of religious storytelling and scientific theory from the pre-Socratic philosophers of ancient Greece to contemporary cosmologists. He wears his knowledge of astronomy, physics, and philosophy lightly as he surveys centuries of thought for the nonspecialist reader. Relying heavily on images and analogies from everyday phenomena, Gleiser largely succeeds in his effort to avoid jargon that would alienate the scientifically challenged.

An intellectual accomplishment that illuminates the magic and the wisdom of the heavens above.