Originally published anonymously, The Unseen Universe is a bold attempt to bring scientific and religious readers together in harmony. Themselves both accomplished scientists, Steward and Tait hoped to calm those Christians who had come to see science as heretical and show scientists how they could reconcile the advances in their field with a belief in God and the immortality of the soul. In this quest, they ask readers to consider the principle of Continuity, in which all the mechanics in nature have a cause that is also found in nature. And in following this chain of continuity backward, they inevitably come upon a prime mover, for if the universe is not eternal, then it must have been started, and this is where science and religion can share the same ground. Readers of science and philosophy will be called to ponder the nature of the universe for themselves. Scottish physicist BALFOUR STEWART (1828-1887) studied and wrote about the nature of radiation, meteorology, and magnetism. Scottish physicist PETER GUTHRIE TAIT (1831-1901) is most famous for writing, with Lord Kelvin, the groundbreaking physics textbook Treatise on Natural Philosophy (1867).

The Victorians are known for their commitment to materialism, evidenced by the dominance of empiricism in the sciences and realism in fiction. Yet there were other strains of thinking during the period in the physical sciences, social sciences, and literature that privileged the spacesbetweenthe material and immaterial. This book examines how the emerging language of the "imponderable" helped Victorian writers and physicists make sense of new experiences of modernity. As Sarah Alexander argues, while Victorian physicists were theorizing ether, energy and entropy, and non-Euclidean space and atom theories, writers such as Charles Dickens, William Morris, and Joseph Conrad used concepts of the imponderable to explore key issues of capitalism, imperialism, and social unrest.

What conceptual blind spot kept the ancient Greeks (unlike the Indians and Maya) from developing a concept of zero? Why did St. Augustine equate nothingness with the Devil? What tortuous means did 17th-century scientists employ in their attempts to create a vacuum? And why do contemporary quantum physicists believe that the void is actually seething with subatomic activity? You’ll find the answers in this dizzyingly erudite and elegantly explained book by the English cosmologist John D. Barrow. Ranging through mathematics, theology, philosophy, literature, particle physics, and cosmology, The Book of Nothing explores the enduring hold that vacuity has exercised on the human imagination. Combining high-wire speculation with a wealth of reference that takes in Freddy Mercury and Shakespeare alongside Isaac Newton, Albert Einstein, and Stephen Hawking, the result is a fascinating excursion to the vanishing point of our knowledge.

Mark Wilson explores our strategies for understanding the world. We frequently cannot reason about nature in the straightforward manner we anticipate, but must use alternative thought processes that reach useful answers in opaque and roundabout ways; and philosophy must find better descriptive tools to reflect this.