There are real wars going on in the world as I write this review, so it seems wrong to refer to a 1990s kerfuffle among academics of different faculties as ‘the science wars’, but it appears that’s what the events around the Sokal affair are now called. A physicist called Alan Sokal had managed to publish a fake paper in a social sciences journal, with the intention of ridiculing postmodernists who described science as a social construct, as opposed to the gradual revelation of the ultimate truth.
Andrew Pontzen, a professor of cosmology at University College London, UK, has long been fascinated by the role of computers in giving us new knowledge of our world. In this, his first book, he presents the story of some of the advances in computer technology that have afforded us penetrating insights into the nature and essence of physical reality.
The author, Jonathan Kennedy, is a lecturer in global public health at Queen Mary University in London, UK, and this is his first book. He presents here several cogent arguments to support his contention that a radical revision is now overdue in our understanding of the human story to date.