Alan G. Gross is een professor in de retorica en communicatiewetenschappen, wiens werk zich verdiept in wetenschappelijke communicatie, retorische theorie en visuele communicatie binnen de wetenschap. Hij onderzoekt hoe wetenschappelijke kennis wordt geconstrueerd, geïnterpreteerd en verspreid. Zijn onderzoek belicht de ingewikkelde relatie tussen taal, denken en wetenschappelijke vooruitgang. Zijn publicaties verkennen de aard van wetenschappelijke discours en de impact ervan op ons begrip van de wereld.
The ability to communicate in print and person is essential to the life of a successful scientist. This title teaches science students and scientists how to improve the clarity, cogency, and communicative power of their words and images. It analyzes the examples of how the best scientists communicate.
The sublime evokes our awe, our terror, and our wonder. Applied first in ancient Greece to the heights of literary expression, in the 18th-century the sublime was extended to nature and to the sciences, enterprises that viewed the natural world as a manifestation of God's goodness, power, and wisdom. In The Scientific Sublime, Alan Gross reveals the modern-day sublime in popular science. He shows how the great popular scientists of our time--Richard Feynman, Stephen Hawking, Steven Weinberg, Brian Greene, Lisa Randall, Rachel Carson, Stephen Jay Gould, Steven Pinker, Richard Dawkins, and E. O. Wilson--evoke the sublime in response to fundamental questions: How did the universe begin? How did life? How did language? These authors maintain a tradition initiated by Joseph Addison, Edmund Burke, Immanuel Kant, and Adam Smith, towering 18th-century figures who adapted the literary sublime first to nature, then to science--though with one crucial difference: religion has been replaced wholly by science. In a final chapter, Gross explores science's attack on religion, an assault that attempts to sweep permanently under the rug two questions science cannot answer: What is the meaning of life? What is the meaning of the good life?
Considers Internet innovation in both the sciences and humanities Proposes a program that exemplifies two paradoxes: a revolutionary program that champions evolutionary change and a program for institutional change that stays well within the powers and prerogatives colleges and universities traditionally possess. Includes video-enriched web site meant to exemplify what is now possible in terms of supplemental information.