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Progressive
Jul. 21st, 2025 09:06 pmBook Review: The Day The Universe Changed, by James Burke
I dimly remember Connections from the 3-channel TV of my childhood. (Which is to say, I remember being impressed without having much idea what was going on.) This book is based on Burke's later 1985 series, which ironically I don't remember.
The title has to be taken with a pinch of salt. Each chapter is about a stream of progress, rather than an individual event. So whilst it covers the (re)discovery of perspective, Gutenberg's printing press, and Einstein's theory of relativity, the text is far more wide ranging.
A few things emerge. Burke begins in the ancient world. Towards the end of the Roman empire, there was a sense of the end of days among the intelligentsia, who committed the knowledge of the world to posterity as best they could. Whilst much was undoubtedly lost, a remarkable amount of knowledge was preserved and flourished in the Islamic world for hundreds of years before slowly becoming accessible to Christendom, at least partly through the reconquista in Spain. I won't say we're quite there yet, but there is a bleakness around the forces of populism and anti-intellectualism in our time.
Another parallel with modern times is the invention of the printing press. The new technology put many highly skilled scribes out of employment. One can compare this to the threat to jobs from AI. But also, the introduction of the printed word initially led to mass propagation of errors and falsehoods, which sounds like a plague of our own time.
Overall, I would say this text has aged well in 40 years. It is inevitably highly selective, and there are some things we might choose or prioritise differently. The description of the slave trade is rather dry. The chapter on eighteenth and nineteenth century improvements to public health tells the tale of John Snow's measures to combat cholera; we might choose to add Florence Nightingale's data visualisations as another revolutionary tool in healthcare. It's interesting that Burke mentions cholera as the last serious epidemic; the 1918 flu doesn't get a mention. Would the development of an RNA-based vaccine for covid be revolutionary enough to be included if this work was published today?
There's a sense of the inevitability of progress, which is uplifting but jars with my own perception of the last few years.
I dimly remember Connections from the 3-channel TV of my childhood. (Which is to say, I remember being impressed without having much idea what was going on.) This book is based on Burke's later 1985 series, which ironically I don't remember.
The title has to be taken with a pinch of salt. Each chapter is about a stream of progress, rather than an individual event. So whilst it covers the (re)discovery of perspective, Gutenberg's printing press, and Einstein's theory of relativity, the text is far more wide ranging.
A few things emerge. Burke begins in the ancient world. Towards the end of the Roman empire, there was a sense of the end of days among the intelligentsia, who committed the knowledge of the world to posterity as best they could. Whilst much was undoubtedly lost, a remarkable amount of knowledge was preserved and flourished in the Islamic world for hundreds of years before slowly becoming accessible to Christendom, at least partly through the reconquista in Spain. I won't say we're quite there yet, but there is a bleakness around the forces of populism and anti-intellectualism in our time.
Another parallel with modern times is the invention of the printing press. The new technology put many highly skilled scribes out of employment. One can compare this to the threat to jobs from AI. But also, the introduction of the printed word initially led to mass propagation of errors and falsehoods, which sounds like a plague of our own time.
Overall, I would say this text has aged well in 40 years. It is inevitably highly selective, and there are some things we might choose or prioritise differently. The description of the slave trade is rather dry. The chapter on eighteenth and nineteenth century improvements to public health tells the tale of John Snow's measures to combat cholera; we might choose to add Florence Nightingale's data visualisations as another revolutionary tool in healthcare. It's interesting that Burke mentions cholera as the last serious epidemic; the 1918 flu doesn't get a mention. Would the development of an RNA-based vaccine for covid be revolutionary enough to be included if this work was published today?
There's a sense of the inevitability of progress, which is uplifting but jars with my own perception of the last few years.