The Day the Universe Changed (BBC) History of ideogical innovation in Western World

James Burke, The Day the Universe Changed. British Broadcasting Corporation, 1985.

Quarto, hardcover, laminated pictorial dustwrapper, 352 pages, profusely illustrated.

Minor foxing on the preliminary pages and edges; otherwise very good condition.

'The Day the Universe Changed is the companion volume to James Burke's television series which has been over three years in the making. Research and filming have taken the author to over twenty countries to examine the origins of the Western view of life and how the various elements of this view have been generated by the particular needs and knowledge of the period.

'The fully illustrated book looks at eight different moments in history when a change in the body of knowledge radically altered the accepted view, and in doing so gave birth to a major institution or way of thinking which has become basic to the modern world. Those key events were: the arrival of Aristotelian logic from medieval Arab Spain; the rediscovery of perspective geometry from Renaissance Florence; the development of the printing press; the study of trajectories that found the law of gravity; the religious and agricultural causes of the Industrial Revolution; the pairing of medicine with statistics in revolutionary France; the volcanic origins of evolution in the last century; and the American accident that brought quantum physics and the atom bomb.'