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How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science
Pantheon
July 2009
On Sale: July 14, 2009
576 pages
ISBN: 0375422226
EAN: 9780375422225
Hardcover
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Non-Fiction
A riveting history of the men and women whose discoveries
and inventions at the end of the eighteenth century gave
birth to the Romantic Age of Science. When young Joseph Banks stepped onto a Tahitian beach in
1769, he hoped to discover Paradise. Inspired by the
scientific ferment sweeping through Britain, the botanist
had sailed with Captain Cook on his first Endeavour voyage
in search of new worlds. Other voyages of discovery—
astronomical, chemical, poetical, philosophical—swiftly
follow in Richard Holmes’s original evocation of what truly
emerges as an Age of Wonder. Brilliantly conceived as a relay of scientific stories, The
Age of Wonder investigates the earliest ideas of deep time
and space, and the explorers of “dynamic science,” of an
infinite, mysterious Nature waiting to be discovered. Three
lives dominate the book: William Herschel and his sister
Caroline, whose dedication to the study of the stars
forever changed the public conception of the solar system,
the Milky Way, and the meaning of the universe; and Humphry
Davy, who, with only a grammar school education stunned the
scientific community with his near-suicidal gas experiments
that led to the invention of the miners’ lamp and
established British chemistry as the leading professional
science in Europe. This age of exploration extended to
great writers and poets as well as scientists, all creators
relishing in moments of high exhilaration, boundary-pushing
and discovery. Holmes’s extraordinary evocation of this age of wonder
shows how great ideas and experiments—both successes and
failures—were born of singular and often lonely dedication,
and how religious faith and scientific truth collide. He
has written a book breathtaking in its originality, its
storytelling energy, and its intellectual significance.
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