The Earth: From Myths to Knowledge

By Hubert Krivine and Tariq Ali

Defending scientific truths in an age of obscurantism

Are we entitled to say that Earth is 4.55 billion years old, and its trajectory an ellipse centered on the Sun, with an average radius of 150 million kilometers? Most educated people today would say yes. Curiously, however, three hundred years after the century of Enlightenment, the fact that these assertions constitute what it is customary to call “scientific truths” is often perceived, especially by postmodernists, as naïve, improper or even (paradoxically) wrong.

Against the fashionable relativist idea that science is no more than a socially constructed doxa, and reality nothing more than what we ourselves bring to it, this straightforward yet highly vigorous book rehabilitates a supposedly outdated, naïvely realist notion: “scientific truth.”

• Language: English
• Publisher: Verso
• Release date: Apr 1, 2015
• ISBN: 9781781687987

Hubert Krivine

Hubert Krivine is a physicist, retired professor, and researcher at the Laboratoire de physique nucl�aire et des hautes �nergies. He is the author of several books on modern physics.

Reviews for The Earth

[davidwineberg · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

There seems to be an unending stream of books focused on the philosopher-scientists and how they advanced thinking. This one takes a slightly different angle, but still ends up examining the same things. The angle here is how we came to the age of the earth, how we came to understand the movement of the earth, and how we determined the distance from the earth to the sun. It includes all the usual suspects: Aristotle, Ptolemy, Galileo, Copernicus, Kepler, Brahe, Newton, Kelvin, but also references to India, China, Egypt and Arabia, which is refreshing.This angle is expressed as overcoming institutional obstacles. In the case of the age of the earth, overcoming the stories of the Christian bible. In the case of the movement of the earth, first overcoming the incorrect laws of Aristotle, then the stories of the Christian bible. The bulk of the argument is the treatment by the Catholic church, right up to Benedict XVI.Krivine covers a tremendous amount in quite remarkable detail, but the book attempts so much, it must inevitably fail certain audiences. It has the history of science and of the scientists who made it. It has the influence of religions worldwide, and how they impeded progress (even if only in the minds of the scientists themselves). It has how different religions faced and handled different facts and theories. It has the math, the geometry and the calculations to demonstrate how numbers were arrived at. It even has how those numbers have changed over the centuries as science became more confident and more sophisticated. At any given point, some of these aspects will not appeal to a reader. Then, the whole effort gets subsumed by the very definition of “fact”. What is a fact? How is a scientific fact better or worse than say, a legal fact? How do we justify so-called facts changing over time? Can we trust “scientific fact”?And after all this philosophical uncertainty (the specialty of philosophy after all), the book ends with summaries of the equations and formulas used to arrive at the facts. So Krivine’s The Earth is hard to categorize, and harder to read than it should be.David Wineberg