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Culture, history and society

Culture, history and society

Shelf life: Nikos Prantzos

01 Apr 2005

Nikos Prantzos is a researcher at the Institute of Astrophysics in Paris


What are the three best popular-science books?

Selecting “the best” book of all time is like comparing the Real Madrid football team of the early 1960s with Brazil’s national side of 1970 or AC Milan in the 1990s: it is a simply impossible task! Having said that, here is my very personally biased judgement.

In first place I put De Raerum Natura(On the Nature of Things), which was written in about 50 BC by the Roman poet Titus Lucretius Carus. It is a wonderful exposition of what the great philosophers of antiquity thought about nature. Some chapters are real marvels, such as the one explaining why matter has to be composed of infinitesimal, indivisible entities (i.e. atoms). The book is an all-time classic and is now taught in high-school literature classes in many countries.

Galileo Galilei’s Dialogue on the Two Chief World Systems comes second. Written in about 1630, it is a scientific and literary masterpiece. It deals with the “hottest” topic of those days – the Copernican versus the Ptolemaic system – and convincingly presents arguments for both sides. It also appears in the form of a conversation between three people (Salviati, Sagredo and Simplicio). This makes the book easier to read and is a tactic that has been adopted by many other subsequent science authors for the same reason.

In the third place I have a very French choice – the Exposition du système du monde of 1780 by Pierre Simon de Laplace. It is a good, authoritative account of the “new world system” as it emerged in the days of Newton. Moreover, it includes the first ideas about the objects we now call “black holes” and what he called astres occlus or “dark stars”. If I could have a fourth choice, it would be Entretiens sur la pluralité de mondes, written by Bernard le Bovier de Fontenelle in 1686. It is also a beautiful presentation of the scientific ideas of his period, this time in the form of a dialogue between a philosopher and a marchioness.

In particular, it contains the first presentation (that I am aware of) of the “Fermi paradox” – almost three centuries before Fermi himself!

What science books are you currently reading?

I am reading (very slowly) two more recent titles: The Code Book by Simon Singh about cryptography through the ages; and Lyn Margulis’s The Symbiotic Planet, which examines issues of biology, evolution and ecology.

What else are you reading?

I am trying to read a collected work (in French) called La mort et l’immortalité or Death and Immortality. It is very thick – about 1600 pages long – but is a fascinating account of how death, after death, the soul and so on were perceived by various cultures across the world and over the ages. It has about 70 contributions by various people, including anthropologists, theologists, sociologists, medical doctors and philosophers. I particularly like the introduction by the French philosopher Edgar Morin and the epilogue by the Italian semiologist Umberto Eco. I have contributed a chapter to the book on the death of the Sun, the galaxy and the future of the universe as a whole.

Which popular-science book have you never read, but feel you ought to have tackled?

Many years ago I started reading Le hasard et la necessité (Chance and Necessity) by Jacques Monod, but I never finished it; I hope I will do so one of these days, because he had some quite profound ideas about evolution.

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