Book Review : Blasphemy
By Sean ~ May 12th, 2008. Filed under: Book Reviews.
I have a soft spot for Douglas Preston. He and Lincoln Child wrote Relic and several other really fun books including Thunderhead. Thunderhead was the book that got me to visit the Grand Staircase Escalante National Monument which is really one of my favorite places.
Blasphemy is the story of a supercollider even bigger then the new one at CERN going online. When it is fired up for the test run something very unexpected happens. I really don’t want to give to much away, but it is a fun ride. If you liked any of Preston or Child’s other books this one is very enjoyable.
That being said, one of the big conflicts in the book is with the evangelical christians that don’t want the supercollider to go online. As I was reading it struck me that while fundamentalist christians have a problem with many of the life sciences (genetics, biology, etc…) I haven’t heard the same kind of uproar against the physical sciences. I’m really not sure why this is the case.
Back in the day, the physical sciences were the direct target of religion (Copernicus, etc…). But now, and I might be wrong, there is very little opposition. I wonder if it is because physics has moved so far beyond the questions that religion had tried to answer that they seem to operate in two different spheres. Or it could just be the case that our society is so science illiterate that other then the few hot button issues, very few people know or care about what modern physics (or science in general) is doing.
If that is the case, you can probably look for that to change in the near future, as physics gets weirder and weirder. It seems to me that as physics gets closer to answering some of the fundamental questions of existence that it will be drawn back into the ire of those that believe that we should not even be asking the questions, or that all we already need to know has been previously revealed in the Bible.
Or maybe or general ignorance and apathy towards science will win out and most people just won’t care.
I didn’t mean to end the review of such a fun book on a down like that.
