The Mysterious Universe

By James Hopwood Jeans

Book Overview

The Mysterious Universe is a popular science book which begins with a full-page citation of the famous passage in Plato's Republic, Book VII, laying out the allegory of the cave. The book made... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: B001K69PEK
• Release Date: January 1930
• Publisher: Cambridge : Cambridge University Press
• Weight: 0.50 lbs.

Customer Reviews

The Mysterious Universe

This text was published in 1931, after the fall of Wall Street, when people were feeling uneasy about world tensions and a faltering economy. Much like today! Jeans was a famous scientist and thinker, which comes through his work like a beam of golden light. I'm usually attracted to the arcane, the esoteric, but this text held my interest and then some. Jeans develops his ideas in the following chapters: --The Dying Sun --The New World of Modern Physics --Matter and Radiation --Relativity and the Ether --Into the Deep Waters Jeans forwards the concept of radiation--all around us, through us--as germane to understanding life itself. Apparently he was inspired to develop this idea from one of his famous friends, Dr. Oscar Brunler, who also hit on radiation theory in his writings. Although we have progressed miles in our understanding of physics, this text if nothing else helps us to understand the dawning of its importance in everyday life. Well written and thought-provoking!