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The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science
by Richard Holmes (HarperPress)
The Age of Wonder is Holmes's first major biography in over a decade and explores the scientific ferment that swept across Britain at the end of the 18th century. Holmes proposes a radical vision of science before Darwin, exploring the earliest ideas of deep time and deep space, the creative rivalry with the French scientific establishment, and the startling impact of discovery on great writers and poets such as Mary Shelley, Coleridge, Byron and Keats. Holmes shows how great ideas and experiments are born out of lonely passion, how scientific discoveries (and errors) are made, how intense relationships are forged and broken by research, and how religious faith and scientific truth collide. The result is breathtaking in its originality, its story-telling energy, and not least, in its intellectual significance.
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