Victorian Relativity: Radical Thought and Scientific Discovery - Couverture souple

Herbert, Christopher

Couverture souple

ISBN 10 : 0226327337 ISBN 13 : 9780226327334

Editeur : University of Chicago Press, 2001

Synopsis

One of the articles of faith of twentieth-century intellectual history is that the theory of relativity in physics sprang in its essentials from the unaided genius of Albert Einstein; another is that scientific relativity is unconnected to ethical, cultural, or epistemological relativisms. Victorian Relativity challenges these assumptions, unearthing a forgotten tradition of avant-garde speculation that took as its guiding principle "the negation of the absolute" and set itself under the militant banner of "relativity."

Christopher Herbert shows that the idea of relativity produced revolutionary changes in one field after another in the nineteenth century. Surveying a long line of thinkers including Herbert Spencer, Charles Darwin, Alexander Bain, W. K. Clifford, W. S. Jevons, Karl Pearson, James Frazer, and Einstein himself, Victorian Relativity argues that the early relativity movement was bound closely to motives of political and cultural reform and, in particular, to radical critiques of the ideology of authoritarianism. Recuperating relativity from those who treat it as synonymous with nihilism, Herbert portrays it as the basis of some of our crucial intellectual and ethical traditions.

A propos du livre

À propos de l'auteur

Christopher Herbert is a professor of English at Northwestern University. He is the author of Trollope and Comic Pleasure and Culture and Anomie: Ethnographic Imagination in the Nineteenth Century.

Détails de l'édition

• Éditeur: University of Chicago Press
• Date d'édition: 2001
• Langue: anglais
• ISBN 10: 0226327337
• ISBN 13: 9780226327334
• Reliure: Broché
• Nombre de pages: 318
• Coordonnées du fabricant: non disponible
• Personne responsable: non disponible