Most Popular Books by Jacob Bronowski

Dr Jacob Bronowksi''s The Ascent of Man traces the development of human society through our understanding of science. First published in 1973 to accompany the groundbreaking BBC television series, it is considered one of the first works of ''popular science'', illuminating the historical and social context of scientific development for a generation of readers. In his highly accessible style, Dr Bronowski discusses human invention from the flint tool to geometry, agriculture to genetics, and from alchemy to the theory of relativity, showing how they all are expressions of our ability to understand and control nature. In this new paperback edition, The Ascent of Man inspires, influences and informs as profoundly as ever.

Jacob Bronowski was, with Kenneth Clarke, the greatest popularizer of serious ideas in Britain between the mid 1950s and the early 1970s. Trained as a mathematician, he was equally at home with painting and physics, and wrote a series of brilliant books that tried to break down the barriers between ''the two cultures''. He denounced ''the destructive modern prejudice that art and science are different and somehow incompatible interests''. He wrote a fine book on William Blake while running the National Coal Board''s research establishment. The Common Sense of Science, first published in 1951, is a vivid attempt to explain in ordinary language how science is done and how scientists think. He isolates three creative ideas that have been central to science: the idea of order, the idea of causes and the idea of chance. For Bronowski, these were common-sense ideas that became immensely powerful and productive when applied to a vision of the world that broke with the medieval notion of a world of things ordered according to their ideal natures. Instead, Galileo, Huyghens and Newton and their contemporaries imagined ''a world of events running in a steady mechanism of before and after''. We are still living with the consequences of this search for order and causality within the facts that the world presents to us.

Traces the development of thought through historical movements and periods from 1500 to 1830.

Science and Human Values was originally a lecture by Jacob Bronowski at MIT in 1953. Published five years later, it opens unforgettably with Bronowski''s description of Nagasaki in 1945: ''a bare waste of ashes'', making him acutely aware of science''s power both for good and for evil. After such knowledge, what forgiveness? With care and erudition Bronowski argues that scientific endeavour is an essentially creative act, part of a great shared human interest in ourselves and the world around us; and, routinely, a process of trial-and-error, the end of which is not - cannot be - preordained. ''Above all, Bronowski strove to make science and technology answerable to social progress, to ''human values.'' He anticipated the deepening gap between the ''two cultures'' and knew that the sciences must be restored to a place in political common sense.'' George Steiner

“A gem of enlightenment. . . . One rejoices in Bronowski’s dedication to the identity of acts of creativity and of imagination, whether in Blake or Yeats or Einstein or Heisenberg.”—Kirkus Reviews “According to Bronowski, our account of the world is dictated by our biology: how we perceive, imagine, symbolize, etc. He proposes to explain how we receive and translate our experience of the world so that we achieve knowledge. He examines the mechanisms of our perception; the origin and nature of natural language; formal systems and scientific discourse; and how science, as a systematic attempt to establish closed systems one after another, progresses by exploring its own errors and new but unforeseen connections. . . . A delightful look at the inquiring mind.”—Library Journal “Eminently enjoyable to read, with a good story or ‘bon mot’ on every page.”—Nature “A well-written and brilliantly presented defense of the scientific enterprise which could be especially valuable to scientists and to teachers of science at all levels.”—AAAS Science Books & Films Contents 1. The Mind as an Instrument for Understanding 2. The Evolution and Power of Symbolic Language 3. Knowledge as Algorithm and as Metaphor 4. The Laws of Nature and the Nature of Laws 5. Error, Progress, and the Concept of Time 6. Law and Individual Responsibility

Bronowski was fascinated by William Blake for much of his life. His first book about him, A Man Without a Mask , was published in 1944. In 1958 his famous Penguin selection of Blake''s poems and letters was published. As further testimony to Bronowski''s enthusiasm it should be noted that the final plate in the book of his great TV series The Ascent of Man is Blake''s frontispiece to Songs of Experience . William Blake and the Age of Revolution , first published in 1965, is, in some ways, a revised edition of A Man Without a Mask, in others, a new book. In it Bronowski gives a stimulating interpretation of Blake''s art and poetry in the context of the revolutionary period in which he was working. Like all of Bronowski''s writings it dazzles with wide-ranging erudition, making this work far removed from conventional literary criticism.

Mathematician, poet, philosopher, life scientist, playwright, teacher, Jacob Bronowski could readily be referred to as a Renaissance Man. But in the historical context that would do him a disservice: he is, par excellence, a Twentieth Century Man, who has traced the arts and sciences of earlier centuries and especially those of his own time to their common root in the uniquely human imagination.Bronowski is the author of such widely read books as The Ascent of Man and Science and Human Values. In 1977, The MIT Press published A Sense of the Future: Essays in Natural Philosophy. In those essays, the emphasis is on scientific questions, but in a number of them the notion of "art as a mode of knowledge" is invoked to make the science clearer and its human dimension more vivid. The Visionary Eye serves as a companion volume: here the emphasis is on the arts and humanities, but (as the subtitle suggests) "science as a mode of imagination" comes into play to extend the reach of the visionary eye.The Visionary Eye contains eleven essays: "The Nature of Art," "The Imaginative Mind in Art," "The Imaginative Mind in Science," "The Shape of Things," "Architecture as a Science and Architecture as an Art," and Art as a Mode of Knowledge, Bronowski''s A. W. Mellon Lectures given at the National Gallery of Art in Washington. The essays discuss examples taken from across the spectrum of the arts, past and present -- music, poetry, painting and sculpture, architecture, industrial design, and engineering artifacts -- in the coherent context of Bronowski''s view of the human creative process.

Essays defending the human claim to have a mind.

Presents the never-ending life cycle of a carbon atom from its birth in a star billions of years ago to the present time where it perhaps is a part of your body.

The collection consists of the papers arising out of the professional work of Jacob Bronowski. This includes research material and manuscripts for his many books, essays and lectures; correspondence relating to their publication; and correspondence with scientists, academics, etc. relating to this work.