Read an Excerpt
..It is my contention that a new generation of scientists is emerging,
one for which magic, myth and science are part of the same spectrum of
human cultural activity. It is not the end of Western civilization that
is signified by the appearance of a new species of scientist who takes
myth seriously, but rather the end of an epoch in which the cultural
canon that has shaped the imagination of the West for five centuries is
disintegrating. . . .
The appearance of such new constellations is precisely what this book
is about, for in contradistinction to the mechanistic universe, its
chapters are filled with visions of a cosmos that is alive and
sentient, capable of remembering the past and interacting with our
lives on the most intimate level. . . .
And so, this book announces an apocalypse, of sorts, the twilight of
the mechanical world-view. That world is most emphatically coming to an
end, and the new one that is rising from out of its ruins is the one
that will shape the imagination of the twenty-first century. I have
been privileged to be living at a moment in the history of our culture
when the mutation of a new species of scientist is beginning to
proliferate. Yet, mechanists remain in abundance, and this book is
about how their magnificent ship has not only hit its iceberg, but is
sinking. Slowly.
