Geoffrey Dobson is Associate Professor of Physiology and Pharmacology at James Cook University, Townsville. In A Chaos of Delight, he has ventured far from his speciality into ancient history and mythology and the history of Western science. This book is clearly a labour of love.
Dobson tells us that the trigger for writing A Chaos of Delight came when he was working at the U.S. National Institutes of Health, around 1986. His attempts to explain science and his daily work to his neighbours grew into an overview of ways of looking at the world, ancient and modern.
For the first half of the book, Dobson works through the ways in which ancient civilisations tried to explain the world. He looks at Sumerian, Egyptian and Ancient Greek history and mythology, and at their sciences.
These ancient peoples saw the world as surrounded by water; most believed that the world had emerged from primeval waters.
Dobson summarises the scientific knowledge in these civilisations, including astronomy, mathematics and medicine.
Egyptian mathematics and geometry were particularly impressive; their approximation to pi was close, and the pyramids were built with astonishing geometrical regularity.
Our own science descends primarily from the ancient Greeks: philosophers such as Socrates; medical thinkers like the school of Hippocrates; and polymaths like Archimedes, who was brilliant in mathematics, astronomy, engineering and physics.
During the Roman Empire and the Middle Ages, progress was slower, but it did not stop.
Important figures included the Roman Pliny the Elder, Avicenna and Averroes in the medieval Islamic world, and the Franciscan scholar William of Ockham.
The work of earlier thinkers was revitalised and extended in the Renaissance. Da Vinci, Copernicus, Galileo, Harvey, Descartes and Newton were among the founders of modern Western science. Building on their work, we have a far greater knowledge of the origin of the universe, the evolution of multicellular life, the evolution of the species we know today, and the advance of the human mind.
A Chaos of Delight offers historical perspective to modern Western science. It is a dense, detailed summary more than a simple overview. Inevitably, Dobson is more assured in his treatment of modern science than with ancient myths and texts, which occasionally appear misread. Because of the range of his subject matter, the author is heavily reliant on secondary sources, which are footnoted.
