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Convergence : the idea at the heart of science : how the different disciplines are coming together to tell one coherent, interlocking story, and making science the basis for other forms of knowledge / Peter Watson.

by Watson, Peter, 1943-

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Simon & Schuster, 2017.

Interdisciplinary approach to knowledge.

Science -- History.

9781476754345 (hc.)

First Simon & Schuster hardcover edition.

xxix, 543 pages ; 24 cm.

Published in U.K. with different subtitle: Convergence : the deepest idea in the universe.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Preface. Convergence: "The deepest idea in the universe" -- Introduction. "The unity of the observable world" -- Part one. the most important unifying ideas of all time -- "The greatest of all generalizations" -- "A single stroke unifies life, meaning, purpose, and physical law" -- Part two. the long arm of the laws of physics -- Beneath the pattern of the elements -- The unification of space and time, and of mass and energy -- The "consummated marriage" of physics and chemistry - The interplay of chemistry and biology: "the intimate connection between two kingdoms" -- The unity of science movement: "Integration is the new aim" -- Hubble, Hitler, Hiroshima: Einstein's unifications vindicated -- Part three. "The friendly invasion of the biological sciences by the physical sciences" -- Caltech and the Cavendish: from atomic physics to molecular biology via quantum chemistry -- Biology, the "most unifying" science: the switch from reduction to composition -- Part four. The continuum from minerals to man -- Physics + astronomy = chemistry + cosmology: the second evolutionary synthesis -- A biography of Earth: the unified chronology of geology, botany, linguistics. and archaeology -- The overlaps between new disciplines: ethology, sociobiology, and behavioral economics -- Climatology + oceanography + ethnography -> myth = big history -- Civilization = the orchestration of geography, meteorology, anthropology, and genetics -- The hardening of psychology and its integration with economics -- Dreams of a final unification: physics, mathematics, information, and the universe -- Spontaneous order: the architecture of molecules, new patterns in evolution, and the emergence of quantum biology -- The biological origin of the arts, physics and philosophy, the physics of society, neurology and nature -- Conclusion. Overlaps, patterns, hierarchies: a preexisting order?

A history of science over the past 150 years that offers a powerful new argument - that the many disparate scientific branches are converging on the same truths. Intimate connections have been discovered between physics and chemistry, psychology and biology, genetics and linguistics. Peter Watson describes how the sciences are slowly resolving into one overwhelming, interlocking story about the universe. Watson begins his narrative in the 1850s, the decade when, he argues, the convergence began. The idea of the conservation of energy was introduced in this decade, as was Darwin's theory of evolution - both of which rocketed the sciences forward and revealed unimagined interconnections and overlaps between disciplines. The story then proceeds from each major breakthrough and major scientist to the next, leaping between fields and linking them together. A thrilling new approach to the history of science, revealing how each piece falls into place, and how each uncovers an "emerging order." Convergence is, as Nobel Prize-winning physicist Steven Weinberg has put it, "The deepest thing about the universe."

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