Download or read book Touching the Face of the Cosmos written by Paul Levinson and published by Fordham University Press. This book was released on 2016 with total page 270 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A collection of essays and short stories about space travel and religion. Touching the Face of the Cosmos explores the desire, essentially spiritual, to understand more about our place in the universe, how our lives on Earth are inextricably part of that bigger picture. Drawing on scientists, religious thinkers, and science fiction writers, Paul Levinson and Michael Waltemathe have assembled a volume that combines space travel and religion for anyone interested in outer space, theology, and philosophy.
Download or read book I Ate the Cosmos for Breakfast written by Melissa Studdard and published by Saint Julian Press, Incorporated. This book was released on 2014 with total page 62 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Poetry - ISBN: 978-0-9889447-5-6 Melissa Studdard's high-flying, bold poetic language expresses an erotic appetite for the world: "this desire to butter and eat the stars," as she says, in words characteristically large yet domestic, ambitious yet chuck- ling at their own nerve. This poet's ardent, winning ebullience echoes that of God, a recurring character here, who finds us Her children, splotchy, bawling and imperfect though we are, "flawless in her omni- scient eyes." -Robert Pinsky In so many ways the poems in this book read like paintings, touching and absorbing the light of the known world while fingering the soul until it lifts, trembling. Gates splayed, bodies read as books, and hearts born of mouths, Studdard's study, which is a creation unto itself, would have no doubt pleased Neruda's taste for the alchemic impurity of poetry, which is, as we know, poetry that is not only most pure of heart, but beautifully generous in vision and feeling. -Cate Marvin
Download or read book Mind and Cosmos written by Thomas Nagel and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2012-11-22 with total page 141 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The modern materialist approach to life has conspicuously failed to explain such central mind-related features of our world as consciousness, intentionality, meaning, and value. This failure to account for something so integral to nature as mind, argues philosopher Thomas Nagel, is a major problem, threatening to unravel the entire naturalistic world picture, extending to biology, evolutionary theory, and cosmology. Since minds are features of biological systems that have developed through evolution, the standard materialist version of evolutionary biology is fundamentally incomplete. And the cosmological history that led to the origin of life and the coming into existence of the conditions for evolution cannot be a merely materialist history, either. An adequate conception of nature would have to explain the appearance in the universe of materially irreducible conscious minds, as such. Nagel's skepticism is not based on religious belief or on a belief in any definite alternative. In Mind and Cosmos, he does suggest that if the materialist account is wrong, then principles of a different kind may also be at work in the history of nature, principles of the growth of order that are in their logical form teleological rather than mechanistic. In spite of the great achievements of the physical sciences, reductive materialism is a world view ripe for displacement. Nagel shows that to recognize its limits is the first step in looking for alternatives, or at least in being open to their possibility.
Download or read book The Fabric of the Cosmos written by Brian Greene and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2007-12-18 with total page 594 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: NATIONAL BESTSELLER • From one of the world’s leading physicists and author of the Pulitzer Prize finalist The Elegant Universe, comes “an astonishing ride” through the universe (The New York Times) that makes us look at reality in a completely different way. Space and time form the very fabric of the cosmos. Yet they remain among the most mysterious of concepts. Is space an entity? Why does time have a direction? Could the universe exist without space and time? Can we travel to the past? Greene has set himself a daunting task: to explain non-intuitive, mathematical concepts like String Theory, the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, and Inflationary Cosmology with analogies drawn from common experience. From Newton’s unchanging realm in which space and time are absolute, to Einstein’s fluid conception of spacetime, to quantum mechanics’ entangled arena where vastly distant objects can instantaneously coordinate their behavior, Greene takes us all, regardless of our scientific backgrounds, on an irresistible and revelatory journey to the new layers of reality that modern physics has discovered lying just beneath the surface of our everyday world.
Download or read book To Touch the Face of God written by Kendrick Oliver and published by JHU Press. This book was released on 2013-01-15 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Was the space program the signature project of secular modernity or a symbol of humankind’s perpetual quest for communion with God? “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth . . .” In 1968 the world watched as Earth rose over the moonscape, televised from the orbiting Apollo 8 mission capsule. Radioing back to Houston on Christmas Eve, astronauts recited the first ten verses from the book of Genesis. In fact, many of the astronauts found space flight to be a religious experience. To Touch the Face of God is the first book-length historical study of the relationship between religion and the U.S. space program. Kendrick Oliver explores the role played by religious motivations in the formation of the space program and discusses the responses of religious thinkers such as Paul Tillich and C. S. Lewis. Examining the attitudes of religious Americans, Oliver finds that the space program was a source of anxiety as well as inspiration. It was not always easy for them to tell whether it was a godly or godless venture. Grounded in original archival research and the study of participant testimonies, this book also explores one of the largest petition campaigns of the post-war era. Between 1969 and 1975, more than eight million Americans wrote to NASA expressing support for prayer and bible-reading in space. Oliver’s study is rigorous and detailed but also contemplative in its approach, examining the larger meanings of mankind’s first adventures in “the heavens.”
Download or read book Lost in the Cosmos written by Walker Percy and published by Open Road Media. This book was released on 2011-03-29 with total page 201 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “A mock self-help book designed not to help but to provoke . . . to inveigle us into thinking about who we are and how we got into this mess.” (Los Angeles Times Book Review). Filled with quizzes, essays, short stories, and diagrams, Lost in the Cosmos is National Book Award–winning author Walker Percy’s humorous take on a familiar genre—as well as an invitation to serious contemplation of life’s biggest questions. One part parody and two parts philosophy, Lost in the Cosmos is an enlightening guide to the dilemmas of human existence, and an unrivaled spin on self-help manuals by one of modern America’s greatest literary masters.
Download or read book Mindsteps to the Cosmos written by Gerald S. Hawkins and published by World Scientific. This book was released on 2002 with total page 357 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Mindsteps to the Cosmos shows how modern global civilization depends on giant leaps of understanding that have been made in the past. Science and technology have been inspired and formulated by the sky OCo the cosmos in which we live. Human development could not have taken place on a cloud-shrouded planet. Mathematics was invented to track the movements of the sun, moon and stars even though back then these were thought to be gods. The space program has taken us beyond the earth, and satellite systems are exploring to the ends of the visible universe. This book provides the reader with algorithms to construct personal computer programs for finding the position of the moon and planets, and for calculating dates through historic periods in the Egyptian as well as the old and new style calendars."
Download or read book Touch the Universe written by Noreen Grice and published by . This book was released on 2002-01 with total page 59 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is an innovative and unique astronomy book. It is a combination of Braille and large-print captions that face 14 pages of Hubble Space Telescope photos with embossed shapes that represent various astronomical objects such as planets, stars and jets of gas streaming into space.
Download or read book The Biblical Cosmos written by Robin A. Parry and published by Wipf and Stock Publishers. This book was released on 2014-10-08 with total page 238 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Welcome to the weird and wonderful world of the Bible. When we read Scripture we often imagine that the world inhabited by the Bible's characters was much the same as our own. We would be wrong. The biblical world is an ancient world with a flat earth that stands at the center of the cosmos, and with a vast ocean in the sky, chaos dragons, mystical mountains, demonic deserts, an underground zone for the dead, stars that are sentient beings, and, if you travel upwards and through the doors in the solid dome of the sky, God's heaven--the heart of the universe. This book takes readers on a guided tour of the biblical cosmos with the goal of opening up the Bible in its ancient world. It then goes further and seeks to show how this very ancient biblical way of seeing the world is still revelatory and can speak God's word afresh into our own modern worlds.
Download or read book Four Faces of the Universe written by Robert Kleinman and published by Lotus Press. This book was released on 2007-01-10 with total page 354 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Explores key perpsectives by which we gain insight into the cosmos.
Download or read book Jewish Science Fiction and Fantasy of the 1960s and 70s written by Valerie Estelle Frankel and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2024-09-05 with total page 269 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Following the Holocaust, American literature experienced a resurgence of Jewish themes, characters, and contributions. This book focuses on the genres of science fiction and fantasy of the post-Holocaust period and argues that while the era was colored by grief, it also offered a renaissance of Jewish creative expression. The author provides an overview of texts beginning with the rise of Jewish speculative fiction anthologies in science fiction and fantasy and delving into emerging subgenres such as alternate history, post-apocalyptic, cold war, second-wave feminism, counterculture parodies, new wave, postmodernism, and cyberpunk to illustrate how Jewish culture made its mark on popular culture. The book also covers the Silver Age and Bronze Age of comics which saw Stan Lee, Jack Kirby, Julius Schwartz, and Marv Wolfman form new superhero teams to battle prejudice and draws parallels with some of the most impactful shows made by Jewish creators, including Star Trek, Twilight Zone, and Doctor Who. The analysis also looks beyond the American context to include texts from Germany, the Soviet Union, Brazil, and Israel.
Download or read book Probable Impossibilities written by Alan Lightman and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2022-04-19 with total page 209 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The acclaimed author of Einstein’s Dreams tackles "big questions like the origin of the universe and the nature of consciousness ... in an entertaining and easily digestible way” (Wall Street Journal) with a collection of meditative essays on the possibilities—and impossibilities—of nothingness and infinity, and how our place in the cosmos falls somewhere in between. Can space be divided into smaller and smaller units, ad infinitum? Does space extend to larger and larger regions, on and on to infinity? Is consciousness reducible to the material brain and its neurons? What was the origin of life, and can biologists create life from scratch in the lab? Physicist and novelist Alan Lightman, whom The Washington Post has called “the poet laureate of science writers,” explores these questions and more—from the anatomy of a smile to the capriciousness of memory to the specialness of life in the universe to what came before the Big Bang. Probable Impossibilities is a deeply engaged consideration of what we know of the universe, of life and the mind, and of things vastly larger and smaller than ourselves.
Download or read book Touching the Face of the Cosmos written by Paul Levinson and published by Fordham University Press. This book was released on 2016 with total page 270 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A collection of essays and short stories about space travel and religion. Touching the Face of the Cosmos explores the desire, essentially spiritual, to understand more about our place in the universe, how our lives on Earth are inextricably part of that bigger picture. Drawing on scientists, religious thinkers, and science fiction writers, Paul Levinson and Michael Waltemathe have assembled a volume that combines space travel and religion for anyone interested in outer space, theology, and philosophy.
Download or read book See You in the Cosmos written by Jack Cheng and published by Penguin UK. This book was released on 2017-03-02 with total page 261 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An astonishingly moving middle-grade debut about a space-obsessed boy's quest for family and home. All eleven-year old Alex wants is to launch his iPod into space. With a series of audio recordings, he will show other lifeforms out in the cosmos what life on Earth, his Earth, is really like. But for a boy with a long-dead dad, a troubled mum, and a mostly-not-around brother, Alex struggles with the big questions. Where do I come from? Who's out there? And, above all, How can I be brave? Determined to find the answers, Alex sets out on a remarkable road trip that will turn his whole world upside down . . . For fans of Wonder and The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, Jack Cheng's debut is full of joy, optimism, determination, and unbelievable heart. To read the first page is to fall in love with Alex and his view of our big, beautiful, complicated world. To read the last is to know he and his story will stay with you a long, long time.
Download or read book Cosmos written by Carl Sagan and published by Ballantine Books. This book was released on 2013-12-10 with total page 450 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: RETURNING TO TELEVISION AS AN ALL-NEW MINISERIES ON FOX Cosmos is one of the bestselling science books of all time. In clear-eyed prose, Sagan reveals a jewel-like blue world inhabited by a life form that is just beginning to discover its own identity and to venture into the vast ocean of space. Featuring a new Introduction by Sagan’s collaborator, Ann Druyan, full color illustrations, and a new Foreword by astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson, Cosmos retraces the fourteen billion years of cosmic evolution that have transformed matter into consciousness, exploring such topics as the origin of life, the human brain, Egyptian hieroglyphics, spacecraft missions, the death of the Sun, the evolution of galaxies, and the forces and individuals who helped to shape modern science. Praise for Cosmos “Magnificent . . . With a lyrical literary style, and a range that touches almost all aspects of human knowledge, Cosmos often seems too good to be true.”—The Plain Dealer “Sagan is an astronomer with one eye on the stars, another on history, and a third—his mind’s—on the human condition.”—Newsday “Brilliant in its scope and provocative in its suggestions . . . shimmers with a sense of wonder.”—The Miami Herald “Sagan dazzles the mind with the miracle of our survival, framed by the stately galaxies of space.”—Cosmopolitan “Enticing . . . iridescent . . . imaginatively illustrated.”—The New York Times Book Review
Download or read book Losing Touch with Nature written by Mary Thomas Crane and published by JHU Press. This book was released on 2014-11-24 with total page 242 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Aristotelian naturalism and its discontents -- Losing touch with nature -- Spenser and the new science -- Shakespeare: New forms of nothing -- Matter and power -- Epilogue: What about Bacon?
Download or read book The Mathematical Universe written by Mike Hockney and published by Magus Books. This book was released on with total page 428 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The universe is a mathematical hologram. It's made of ontological mathematics. It's a living, thinking, self-optimising holographic organism composed of immortal, indestructible, ontological mathematical units called monads, defined by the most powerful and beautiful equation in the whole of mathematics: Euler's Formula. Monads have a much more resonant name: souls. We all inhabit Soul World, a wondrous immaterial Singularity outside space and time. Our souls are individual mathematical singularities: autonomous, uncaused, uncreated, dimensionless frequency domains. Via Fourier mathematics, these imperishable, immaterial monadic souls can collectively create the spacetime domain of the material world. Where each soul is a single frequency domain, the material world of space and time is their collective Fourier output. What is "matter"? It's simply dimensional energy: energy existing in the Fourier spacetime domain rather than in the Fourier dimensionless frequency domain. Welcome to Soul World.
