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Tomorrow is yesterday

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Date Issued:
2013
Summary:
Protosciences, or new sciences trying to establish their legitimacy, are ubiquitous in literature. In the old stories we hear of alchemists who can only dream of the discoveries that modern chemists take for granted, and in the new stories we hear of travelers moving faster than light as our greatest physicists attempt to make that fantasy a reality. Limiting our viewpoint to the modern scientific reductionist view of the universe not only makes little sense if we consider Michael Polanyi's theories of emergence and 'personal knowledge', but it robs medieval scholars for the conceptual credit they are due for theories they could not satisfactorily explain by the future's standards, and stifles the sorts of fantastic possibilities that are opened by the great science-fiction authors. Medieval authors' expositions of protoscientific thought laid the ground work for our own modern disciplines, and by reexamining how this happened we can develop a new appreciation for the power of the imagination.
Title: Tomorrow is yesterday: protoscience from the medieval manuscript to the golden age of science-fiction.
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Name(s): Leivers, Robert James.
Dorothy F. Schmidt College of Arts and Letters
Department of English
Type of Resource: text
Genre: Electronic Thesis Or Dissertation
Date Issued: 2013
Publisher: Florida Atlantic University
Physical Form: electronic
Extent: vi, 73 p..
Language(s): English
Summary: Protosciences, or new sciences trying to establish their legitimacy, are ubiquitous in literature. In the old stories we hear of alchemists who can only dream of the discoveries that modern chemists take for granted, and in the new stories we hear of travelers moving faster than light as our greatest physicists attempt to make that fantasy a reality. Limiting our viewpoint to the modern scientific reductionist view of the universe not only makes little sense if we consider Michael Polanyi's theories of emergence and 'personal knowledge', but it robs medieval scholars for the conceptual credit they are due for theories they could not satisfactorily explain by the future's standards, and stifles the sorts of fantastic possibilities that are opened by the great science-fiction authors. Medieval authors' expositions of protoscientific thought laid the ground work for our own modern disciplines, and by reexamining how this happened we can develop a new appreciation for the power of the imagination.
Identifier: 860991164 (oclc), 3362480 (digitool), FADT3362480 (IID), fau:4193 (fedora)
Note(s): by Robert James Leivers.
Thesis (M.A.)--Florida Atlantic University, 2013.
Includes bibliography.
Mode of access: World Wide Web.
System requirements: Adobe Reader.
Subject(s): Science fiction -- History and criticism
Literature and society
Science, Renaissance
Philosophy, Medieval -- Influence
Science and civilization
Persistent Link to This Record: http://purl.flvc.org/fcla/dt/3362480
Use and Reproduction: http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/
Host Institution: FAU