It’s confirmed: You are not the center of the universe. Not by a long shot. Actually, not by a really, really long shot. Now that we’ve got that cleared up, we can go on to discuss what is the center of the universe and why it matters. And according to Keith Parsons, professor of philosophy at the University of Houston — Clear Lake and the author of the newly released – It Started with Copernicus: Vital Questions about Science,it does matter. Copernicus, the 16th century brainiac who was the first to hold that the earth moved around the sun and not the other way around, managed to mostly stay out of trouble with the church leaders and academics of his time. (The fact that it took him 40 years to go public with his theory might have been a factor there.) Nevertheless, his ideas started a conversation about the intersection between philosophy and science, and God and the universe, that continues to this day. Parsons’s book, just the latest of several that he’s written on the subject, breaks down philosophical questions aboutscience so that normal, non-brainiac types like you and me can understand. Paraphrasing Einstein, Parsons says that in explaining any difficult subject, he makes it as simple as possible, but no simpler. Written in a jargonfree style,– It Started with Copernicus: Vital Questions about Science doesn’t dumb science and philosophy down; instead, it just frees them of the “wehave-to-make-this-really-hard-so-
you’ll-see-how-smart-we-are” attitude that keeps the topics seemingly out of reach for the casual reader. This ain’t
Science for Stupid People, it’s Science for Regular People.
Keith Parsons reads from and signs at 7 p.m. Brazos Bookstore, 2421 Bissonnet. For information, call 713‐523‐0701 or visit brazosbookstore.com. Free.
Tue., Aug. 12, 7 p.m., 2014
This article appears in Aug 7-13, 2014.