Book

Watson, Peter, 1943- author.

Convergence : the idea at the heart of science : how the different disciplines are coming together to tell one coherent, interlocking story, and making science the basis for other forms of knowledge / Peter Watson.

First Simon & Schuster hardcover edition.

New York, NY : Simon & Schuster, 2017.

xxix, 543 pages ; 24 cm

"Convergence is a history of modern science with an original and significant twist. Various scientific disciplines, despite their very different beginnings, have been coming together over the past 150 years, converging and coalescing. Intimate connections have been discovered between physics and chemistry, psychology and biology, genetics and linguistics. In this groundbreaking book, Peter Watson identifies one extraordinary master narrative, capturing how the sciences are slowly resolving into one overwhelming, interlocking story about the universe. Watson begins his narrative in the 1850s, the decade when, he argues, the convergence of the sciences began. The idea of the conservation of energy was introduced in this decade, as was Darwin's theory of evolution--both of which rocketed the sciences forward and revealed unimagined interconnections and overlaps between disciplines. The story then proceeds from each major breakthrough and scientist to the next, leaping between fields and linking them together. Decade after decade, the story captures every crucial scientific advance en route to the present, proceeding like a cosmic detective story, or the world's most massive code-breaking effort. Watson's is a thrilling new approach to the history of science, revealing how each piece fails into place and how each uncovers an "emerging order." Convergence is, as Nobel Prize-winning physicist Steven Weinberg has put it, "the deepest thing about the universe." And Watson's comprehensive and eye-opening book argues that all our scientific efforts are indeed approaching unity. Told through the eyes of the scientists themselves, charting each discovery and breakthrough, Convergence is a gripping way to learn what we now know about the universe and where our inquiries are heading."--Dust jacket.

Interdisciplinary approach to knowledge.

Science -- History.

Published in U.K. with different subtitle: Convergence : the deepest idea in the universe.

Includes bibliographical references (pages 495-524) and index.

Preface. Convergence : "the deepest idea in the universe" -- Introduction. "The unity of the observable world" -- Part one. The most important unifying ideas of all time. "The greatest of all generalizations" -- "A single stroke unifies life, meaning, purpose, and physical law" -- Part two. The long arm of the laws of physics. Beneath the pattern of the elements -- The unification of space and time, and of mass and energy -- The "consummated marriage" of physics and chemistry -- The interplay of chemistry and biology : "the intimate connection between two kingdoms" -- The Unity of Science Movement : "Integration is the new aim" -- Hubble, Hitler, Hiroshima : Einstein's unifications vindicated -- Part three. "The friendly invasion of the biological sciences by the physical sciences". Caltech and the Cavendish : from atomic physics to molecular biology via quantum chemistry -- Biology, the "most unifying" science : the switch from reduction to composition -- Part four. The continuum from minerals to man. Physics + astronomy = chemistry + cosmology : the second evolutionary synthesis -- A biography of Earth : the unified chronology of geology, botany, linguistics, and archaeology -- The overlaps between new disciplines : ethology, sociobiology, and behavioral economics -- Climatology + oceanography + ethnography -> myth = big history -- Civilization = the orchestration of geography, meteorology, anthropology, and genetics -- The hardening of psychology and its integration with economics -- Dreams of a final unification : physics, mathematics, information, and the universe -- Spontaneous order : the architecture of molecules, new patterns in evolution, and the emergence of quantum biology -- The biological origin of the arts, physics and philosophy, the physics of society, neurology and nature -- Conclusion. Overlaps, patterns, hierarchies : a preexisting order?

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