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Maybe someday
33
/100
I Index Overall Rating
Readers
26/100Critics
40/100Scholars
Author:
Jimena Canales
Publisher:
Princeton University Press
Date:
November 10, 2020
"Demons" have long been part of the thought experiments that are a vital part of the creative, intellectual process in modern science. These hypothetical beings imagined by scientists have been used to explore what would happen if one fiddled with or upset the sturdiest of physical laws, have helped clarify the limits of what is possible and revealed cracks in a hypothesis or theory.
What The Reviewers Say
... captivating.
The opening chapters...deftly sprint through centuries of scientific history in the course of introducing the...demons of Descartes, Laplace and Maxwell. But the book’s pace becomes more relaxed once it arrives at the 20th century.
... [for]technologies that threaten human existence, the use of demons feels appropriate...their very identity suggests the workings of a mischievous or malevolent force. Perhaps no group of scientists better understood that than the men and women of the Manhattan Project...and Canales is fascinating on their ethical deliberations.
Canales explores so many fields and societal implications of scientific debates, from atomic bombs to stock-market fluctuations, that she seems to weave in nearly every demon reference of the past four centuries, however tangential. Some meandering historical asides stray from her solid survey of seminal demonic invocations.
