The Invisible Century: Einstein, Freud, and the Search for Hidden Universes [Book Review]

Abstract

The title of this book is a little ambiguous: science writer Richard Panek surely meant it to refer to the 'century of the invisible'. Following his earlier account of Galileo's discovery of previously unseen objects in the sky, Seeing and Believing (Penguin, 1998), he now turns to two giants of twentieth-century scientific and intellectual history, Sigmund Freud and Albert Einstein. He considers how they redefined the way we think about hidden entities and phenomena, in both the deepest recesses of our mind and the farthest reaches of a warped, infinite and expanding Universe.