Abstract

Though they met just once, and even then didn’t know what to make of each other’s work, Einstein and Freud had more in common than they might have imagined. Each ran out of evidence using the traditional scientific methods that had worked well since the dawn of the scientific revolution and each adopted new scientific methods that opened up unprecedented intellectual landscapes—relativity in Einstein’s case, the unconscious in Freud’s. In this brilliant, elegant book, renowned science writer Richard Panek traces the creation of two new sciences—cosmology and psychoanalysis—that have allowed us for more than a hundred years to explore previously unimaginable universes without and within. Like a nonfiction version of Einstein’s Dreams , Panek’s The Invisible Century is a story of a revolution in thought that altered not only what or how much we see, but also the very nature of seeing.