Watson Peter. Convergence: The Idea at the Heart of Science

Simon Schuster, 2017. — 576 p. — ISBN 9781476754369,1476754365.A brilliant history of science over the past 150 years that offers a powerful new argument — that the many disparate scientific branches are converging on the same truths.
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 major scientist to the next, leaping between fields and linking them together. Decade after decade, the story captures every major scientific advance enroute 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 falls 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, it is a gripping way to learn what we now know about the universe and where our inquiries are heading.Epigraph.
Preface: Convergence: « Deepest Idea in the Universe».
Introduction: « Unity of the Observable World».
The Most Important Unifying Ideas of All Time.
« Greatest of All Generalizations».
«A Single Stroke Uniͬes Life, Meaning, Purpose, and Physical Law».
The Long Arm of the Laws of Physics.
Beneath the Pattern of the Elements.
Uniͬcation of Space and Time, and of Mass and Energy.
«Consummated Marriage» of Physics and Chemistry.
Interplay of Chemistry and Biology: « Intimate Connection Between Two Kingdoms».
Unity of Science Movement: «Integration Is the New Aim».
Hubble, Hitler, Hiroshima: Einstein’s Uniͬcations Vindicated.
«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: Switch from Reduction to Composition.
IV The Continuum from Minerals to Man.
Physics + Astronomy = Chemistry + Cosmology: Second Evolutionary Synthesis.
A Biography of Earth: Uniͬed Chronology of Geology, Botany, Linguistics, and Archaeology.
Overlaps Between New Disciplines: Ethology, Sociobiology, and Behavioral Economics.
Climatology + Oceanography + Ethnography → Myth = Big History.
Civilization = Orchestration of Geography, Meteorology, Anthropology, and Genetics.
Hardening of Psychology and Its Integration with Economics.
Dreams of a Final Uniͬcation: Physics, Mathematics, Information, and the Universe.
Spontaneous Order: Architecture of Molecules, New Patterns in Evolution, and the Emergence of Quantum Biology.
Biological Origin of the Arts, Physics and Philosophy, the Physics of Society, Neurology and Nature.
Conclusion: Overlaps, Patterns, Hierarchies: A Preexisting Order?
Acknowledgments.
About Peter Watson.
Notes and References.
Index.