From THE ASCENT OF MAN by Jacob Bronowski. Copyright 1973 by J. Bronowski. By permission of Little, Brown and Company
Foreword | 13 |
Chapter 1 Lower than the Angels | 19 |
Animal adaptation - The human alternative - Beginning in Africa - Fossil evidence - The gift of foresight - Evolution of the head - The mosaic of man - The cultures of the hunter - Across the ice ages - Transhumance cultures: the Lapps - Imagination in cave art. | |
Chapter 2 The Harvest of the Seasons | 59 |
The pace of cultural evolution - Nomad cultures: the Bakhtiari - Beginnings of agriculture: wheat -Jericho - Earthquake country - Technology in the village - The wheel - Domestication of animals: the horse - War Games: Buz Kashi - Settled civilisation. | |
Chapter 3 The Grain in the Stone | 91 |
Coming to the New World - Blood group evidence of migrations - The actions of shaping and splitting - Structure and hierarchy - The city: Machu Picchu - Straight-edge architecture: Paestum - The Roman arch: Segovia - The Gothic adventure: Rheims - Science as architecture The hidden figure: Michelangelo to Moore - Pleasure in construction - Below the visible. | |
Chapter 4 The Hidden Structure | 123 |
Fire, the transforming element - Extraction of metals: copper - The structure of alloys - Bronze as a work of art - Iron to steel: theJapanese sword - Gold - The incorruptible - Alchemical theory of man and nature - Paracelsus and the coming of chemistry - Fire and air: Joseph Priestley - Antoine Lavoisier: combination can be quantified - John Dalton's atomic theory. | |
Chapter 5 The Music of the Spheres | 155 |
The language of numbers - The key to harmony: Pythagoras - The right-ang1ed triangle - Euclid and Ptolemy at Alexandria - Rise of Islam - Arabic numbers - The Alhambra: patterns of space - Crystal symmetries - Perspective from Alhazen - Movement in time, the new dynamic - The mathematics of change. | |
Chapter 6 The Starry Messenger | 189 |
The cycle of seasons - The unmapped sky: Easter Island - Ptolemy's system in the Dondi Clock - Copernicus: the sun as centre - The telescope - Galileo opens the scientific method - Prohibition of the Copernican system - Dialogue on the two systems - The Inquisition - Galileo recants - The Scientific Revolution moves north. | |
Chapter 7 The Majestic Clockwork | 221 |
Kepler's laws - The centre of the world - Isaac Newton's innovations: fluxions - Unfolding the spectrum - Gravitation and the Principia - The intellectual dictator - Challenge in satire - Newton's absolute space - Absolute time - Albert Einstein - The traveller carries his own space and time - Relativity is proved - The new philosophy. | |
Chapter 8 The Drive for Power | 259 |
The English revolution - Everyday technology: James Brindley - The revolt against privilege: Figuro - Benjamin Franklin and the American revolution - The new men: masters of iron - The new outlook: Wedgwood and the Lunar society - The driving factory - The new preoccupution: energy - The cornucopia of invention - The unity of nature. | |
Chapter 9 The Ladder of Creation | 291 |
The naturalists - Charles Darwin - Alfred Wallace - Impact of South America - The wealth of species - Wallace loses his collection - Natural selection conceived - The continuity of evolution - Louis Pasteur: right hand, left hand - Chemical constants in evolution - The origin of life - The four bases - Are other forms of life possible? | |
Chapter 10 World Within World | 321 |
The cube of salt - Its elements - Mendeleev's game of patience - The periodic table - J. J. Thomson: the atom has parts - Structure in new art - Structure in the atom: Rutherford and Niels Bohr - The life cycle of a theory - The nucleus has parts - The neutron: Chadwick and Fermi - Evolution of the elements - The second law as statistics - Stratified stability - Copying the physics of nature - Ludwig Boltzmann: atoms are real. | |
Chapter 11 Knowledge or Certainty | 353 |
There is no absolute knowledge - The spectrum of invisible radiations - The refinement of detail - Gauss and the idea of uncertainty - The sub-structure of reality: Max Born - Heisenberg's principle of uncertainty - The principle of tolerance: Leo Szilard - Science is human. | |
Chapter 12 Generation upon Generation | 379 |
The voice of insurrection - The kitchen garden naturalist: Gregor Mendel - Genetics of the pea - Instant oblivion - An all-or-nothing model of inheritance - The magic number two: sex - Crick and Watson's model of DNA - Replication and growth - Cloning of identical forms - Sexual choice in human diversity. | |
Chapter 13 The Long Childhood | 411 |
Man, the social solitary - Human specificity - Specific development of the brain - Precision of the hand - The speech areas - The postponement of decision - The mind as an instrument of preparation - The democracy of the intellect - The moral imagination - The brain and the computer: John von Neumann - The strategy of values - Knowledge is our destiny - The commitment of man. | |
Bibliography | 440 |
Index | 443 |