Those of you who have read or are reading Stephenson’s Quicksilver might also want to read Carl Zimmer’s Soul Made Flesh. PZ Myers reviews the Soul Made Flesh here:
The book is a fascinating combination of history, philosophy, biography, and science. And by “science”, I don’t mean the plain recital of observations and inferences, but the process of grappling with the evidence, testing hypotheses, and deriving new and better explanations. I’ll be assigning Soul Made Flesh as required reading next time I offer my neuroscience course.
and provides a comparison of the two here:
After all, both describe the same period of intellectual ferment, and both make it clear that it was not a good thing to be a dog in England in the last half of the 1600s.
Oh, and Myers has also posted the most titillating picture of the week. Read the caption here.
NB (1/18): Corrected Zimmer’s first name.
Darn. I was sure you were going to link to my portrait.
My wife’s reading Quicksilver currently, then it’s mine. I thought Paul Zimmer only wrote a few fantasies? Fine ones, at that. Time to look it up.
Scott,
You are correct re Paul Zimmer. The Soul Made Flesh was written by Carl Zimmer. Now corrected in the post.