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Unweaving the Rainbow
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  • Published: 26 May 2016
  • ISBN: 9780141026183
  • Imprint: Penguin Press
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 352
  • RRP: $30.00
Categories:

Unweaving the Rainbow

Science, Delusion and the Appetite for Wonder

Formats & editions
Paperback
26 May 2016
EBook
6 Apr 2006
Audiobook
22 Apr 2021
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The international bestseller.

A dazzling, passionate polemic against anti-science movements of all kinds.

Keats accused Newton of destroying the poetry of the rainbow by explaining the origin of its colours. In this illuminating and provocative book, Richard Dawkins argues that Keats could not have been more mistaken, and shows how an understanding of science enhances our wonder of the world. He argues that mysteries do not lose their poetry because they are solved: the solution is often more beautiful than the puzzle, uncovering even deeper mysteries. Dawkins takes up the most important and compelling topics in modern science, from astronomy and genetics to language and virtual reality, combining them in a landmark statement on the human appetite for wonder.
  • Published: 26 May 2016
  • ISBN: 9780141026183
  • Imprint: Penguin Press
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 352
  • RRP: $30.00
Categories:

About the author

Richard Dawkins

Richard Dawkins is author of The Selfish Gene, voted The Royal Society's Most Inspiring Science Book of All Time, and also the bestsellers The Blind Watchmaker, Climbing Mount Improbable, The Ancestor's Tale, The God Delusion, and two volumes of autobiography, An Appetite for Wonder and Brief Candle in the Dark. He is a Fellow of New College, Oxford and both the Royal Society and the Royal Society of Literature. In 2013, Dawkins was voted the world’s top thinker in Prospect magazine’s poll of 10,000 readers from over 100 countries.
portrait photo of Richard Dawkins

Also by Richard Dawkins

Books do Furnish a Life
The Magic of Reality
The God Delusion
Brief Candle in the Dark
The Greatest Show on Earth
Outgrowing God
An Appetite For Wonder: The Making of a Scientist
See all

Praise for Unweaving the Rainbow

A brilliant assertion of the wonder and excitement of real, tough, grown-up science

A. S. Byatt, 'Books of the Year', Daily Telegraph

The way Dawkins writes about science is not just a brain-tonic. It is more like an extended stay on a brain health-farm ... You come out feeling lean, tuned and enormously more intelligent

John Carey, Sunday Times

Beautifully written and full of interesting, original ideas. Essential reading

The Times

For Dawkins there is more poetry, not less, in the rainbow because of Newton ... he weaves rainbows of wonder from other provinces of science and then unleashes his fury on those who accuse scientists like him of being unimaginative

Sunday Times

Brilliantly entertaining and stimulating

Observer