Anthony Aveni. 2006. Uncommon Sense: Understanding Nature's Truths Across Time and Culture. University Press of Colorado, Boulder. 242 pages, end notes and further reading ideas for each chapter. IBSN-10 0-87081-828-7 (alkaline paper).
Seeking Pattern out of Chaos
Humans are pattern seekers; or maybe we’re pattern creators. Whether our sense of reality—that is to say, our sense of the way the universe, our backyard, or our kinship circle is ordered—is self-created or imposed upon us, as humans operating in a world of uncertainty and chaos, we require patterns.
Archaeo-astronomer Anthony Aveni’s latest book, called Uncommon Sense: Understanding Nature's Truths Across Time and Culture and published in 2006 by the University Press of Colorado, explores the patterns created by humans of many cultures and time periods—the maps we make, the star charts we follow, the ordering of the universe and our place in it. Along the way, he opens the reader’s mind a little bit to the renderings of the possible universes beyond our Western philosophies.
Archaeo-astronomer Anthony Aveni’s latest book, called Uncommon Sense: Understanding Nature's Truths Across Time and Culture and published in 2006 by the University Press of Colorado, explores the patterns created by humans of many cultures and time periods—the maps we make, the star charts we follow, the ordering of the universe and our place in it. Along the way, he opens the reader’s mind a little bit to the renderings of the possible universes beyond our Western philosophies.
DaVinci and Euclid's Royal Road
Today seems a very appropriate moment to be writing this, as the movie of Dan Brown's DaVinci Code is being released to theatres across the world. Aveni discusses the endless fascination people have with decoding old mysteries; looking for scientific proof of events in religious texts; finding hidden, secret patterns that were unknown before or unexplained or lost in antiquity. Chapters include examinations of our obsession with time and time keeping, maps and map-making, star charts, the construction of the universe, lists; not to mention the history of the Big Bang theory, and the way sometimes interdisciplinary research resolves in a collision of half-understood concepts. Aveni's broad cultural palette includes both Aristotle and the Aztecs; interwoven with pieces of his personal history from his childhood to his teaching career to his introduction into the mysteries of archaeo-astronomy.
Part History of Science, Part Memoir
Attractively formatted (chapter headings are illustrated with what appears to be a manuscript copy of Euclid’s Elements of Geometry)*, and with 36 drawings, maps, and photographs, Uncommon Sense is part memoir, part history of science, part travelogue, part astronomy lesson, part celestial navigation: in fact, the book is almost impossible to classify. And how appropriate that is!
Humans are pattern creators—or maybe we're just seekers, with an unquenchable thirst for finding patterns in nature's chaos. That is the essence of this fascinating book I’ll be thinking about for years to come.
*Actually, I am wrong about the chapter headings' image being from Euclid; author Anthony Aveni tells me the photo is from Johannes Kepler, and a blowup of part of Figure 3. The notes for this illustration read, "A page from one of Kepler's manuscripts showing his calculations. He was the first person to follow through on the conjunction hypothesis for the Star of Bethlehem. (From Arthur Beer and Peter Beer, Kepler (1975): Four Hundred Years, Proceedings of Conferences Held in Honour of Johannes Kepler, 268, St. Petersburg Archives of the Russian Academy of Sciences; photo by Owen Gingerich)"
Humans are pattern creators—or maybe we're just seekers, with an unquenchable thirst for finding patterns in nature's chaos. That is the essence of this fascinating book I’ll be thinking about for years to come.
*Actually, I am wrong about the chapter headings' image being from Euclid; author Anthony Aveni tells me the photo is from Johannes Kepler, and a blowup of part of Figure 3. The notes for this illustration read, "A page from one of Kepler's manuscripts showing his calculations. He was the first person to follow through on the conjunction hypothesis for the Star of Bethlehem. (From Arthur Beer and Peter Beer, Kepler (1975): Four Hundred Years, Proceedings of Conferences Held in Honour of Johannes Kepler, 268, St. Petersburg Archives of the Russian Academy of Sciences; photo by Owen Gingerich)"
