THE DAY THE UNIVERSE CHANGED Primitive man believed that the heavens were ruled bt frightful demons and spirits, and that a giant dragon devoured the moon each night. Midieval man, convinced by the ancient Eqyptian astronomers, thought that the moon, sun, and planets revolved around the earth. Today we believe that the universe is goverened by fixed and discoverable physical laws. But what about the man of the future? How many of our "scientific" principles will he scoff at and denounce as crude superstitions? In The Day The Universe Changed James Burke argues that knowledge is a man-made artifact, and that when man's views of reality are changed by knowledge, reality itself changes. Armed with this provocative thesis, he charts a course from the Middle Ages to today, examining those critical periods in history when the ideas and institutions that have transformed man's understanding of the world were born. The Day The Universe Changed takes as its starting point the rediscovery of the teachings of classical Greece in the eleventh century, which stimulated the passion for scientific learning and divided the midieval world from the modern world. Later chapters consider the rediscovery of perspective geometry in Renaissance Florence and its relation to the notion of individualism; the development of the printing press and the birth of propaganda; the study of cannon trajectories that led to the discovery of the law of gravity; the religious, agricultural, and economic causes of the Industrial Revolution; the pairing of medicine with statistics in Revolutionary France that allowed man to study himself in society; and the origins of evolution and its application in American, Nazi German, and Soviet societies. Finally, and appropriately, Burke considers Heisenberg's fearful Uncertainty Principle, which challenges the rational, Newtonian view and suggests that the true nature of the universe may forever elude us. Systems of belief are discarded as new knowledge renders them apparently invalid. However, if each "truth" is solid in its time, then is knowledge only what we make it? Is there absolute knowledge to find, or is the universe ultimately what we say it is? James BUrke challenges the reader to decide, in this fascinating and original examination of our intellectual heritage. Copyright 1985 by London Writers Ltd. Little, Brown and Company Boston - Toronto ISBN 0-316-11695-5 - - - Click on a title below to order: The Day The Universe Changed