BOOK AIMS TO HIGHLIGHT THE WONDERS OF SCIENCE

In his recent book Unweaving the Rainbow, Richard Dawkins challenges the view that science somehow diminishes our appreciation of the world.

His title is a quotation from the poet Keats, who believed that the discoveries of Sir Isaac Newton had destroyed all the poetry of the rainbow by reducing it to its prismatic colours.

Dawkins argues that while poets might well seek inspiration from science, science should reach out to wider constituencies among poets, artists, and all others who share some of the same impulses.

He also suggests we that we could 'take trhe sing out' of seemingly astonishing coincidences by quietly sitting down and calculating the likelihood that it would have happened anyway.

One example he gives is when his wife bought her mother an antique watch and she got home and peeled off the label to find revealed her mother's initials, "M.A.B."

"Uncanny?" he asks.

He does the calculation based on frequencies of names in telephone directories and finds that if everyone in Britain bought an antique engraved watch, 3,000 of them would find their mother's initials on it.

The 337 page book Unweaving the Rainbow: Delusion, and the Appetite for Wonder by Richard Dawkins is number ISBN 0-395-88382-2.