Convergence

Watson offers a history of modern science organised around a single claim: that the various scientific disciplines, despite their very different beginnings, have been coming together over the past century and a half, converging and coalescing. Intimate connections have been discovered between physics and chemistry, between psychology and biology, and between genetics and linguistics, and Watson identifies in these one extraordinary master narrative, capturing how the sciences are slowly resolving into one overwhelming and interlocking story about the universe. He begins in the eighteen fifties, the decade in which, he argues, the convergence of the sciences began, and carries the story through every major advance from that point to the present. The narrative proceeds, in his description, like a cosmic detective story, or the world's most massive code breaking effort, with each piece falling into place beside the others and each new result uncovering what he calls an emerging order. The convergence itself is the idea at the heart of science, the thread that runs through its modern history and the reason its separate findings hang together. Watson presents this as a new approach to writing the history of science.

Written from the publisher description, Simon and Schuster.

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• Peter Watson