What is the role of scientists in society? What should we think when they talk about more than just science? Mary Midgley discusses the high spiritual ambitions which tend to gather around the notion of science.

With The Modern Myths, brilliant science communicator Philip Ball spins a new yarn. From novels and comic books to B-movies, it is an epic exploration of literature, new media and technology, the nature of storytelling, and the making and meaning of our most important tales. Myths are usually seen as stories from the depths of time—fun and fantastical, but no longer believed by anyone. Yet, as Philip Ball shows, we are still writing them—and still living them—today. From Robinson Crusoe and Frankenstein to Batman, many stories written in the past few centuries are commonly, perhaps glibly, called “modern myths.” But Ball argues that we should take that idea seriously. Our stories of Dracula, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and Sherlock Holmes are doing the kind of cultural work that the ancient myths once did. Through the medium of narratives that all of us know in their basic outline and which have no clear moral or resolution, these modern myths explore some of our deepest fears, dreams, and anxieties. We keep returning to these tales, reinventing them endlessly for new uses. But what are they really about, and why do we need them? What myths are still taking shape today? And what makes a story become a modern myth? In The Modern Myths, Ball takes us on a wide-ranging tour of our collective imagination, asking what some of its most popular stories reveal about the nature of being human in the modern age.

Examining the nature of myth-making and its surprising appearance in popular science writing.

Modern physics has degenerated into mythology. Quantum mechanics (QM) is based on the assumption that "elementary" particles are truly fundamental. This assumption has been invalidated by numerous experiments. By interaction with other particles, quarks and other components of "elementary" particles are pulled apart or squeezed together. Due to such deformations, the complex structures called "elementary" particles accumulate internal energy, which is neglected in the entire Quantum Mechanics literature. Double slit experiments do not justify the abandonment of Classical Physics and the creation of Quantum Mechanics. The interference patterns, which supposedly demonstrate the unique nature of "elementary" particles, are faithfully reproduced with common objects. Correctly applied i.e., without neglecting internal energy, Classical Physics provides a deterministic and unitary description of virtually all quantum phenomena. Classical Physics also explains relativistic effects, i.e., mass increase, length contraction and time dilation without recourse to particular hypotheses like the existence of aether. The components of "elementary" particles are bound by cohesion forces propagating through quanta. The energy of quanta increases with particle velocity according to the Doppler Effect. As a result, the relativistic energy and mass of an "elementary" particle are proportional to the Lorentz factor. This mass increase causes length contraction and time dilation.

Mythic Imagination Today is an illustrated guide to the interpenetration of mythology and science throughout the ages. This monograph brings alive our collective need for story as a guide to the rules, roles, and relationships of everyday life.

This is a bilingual edition of the selected peer-reviewed papers that were submitted for the International Symposium on Jesuit Studies on the thought of the Jesuit Francisco Suárez (1548–1617). The symposium was co-organized in Seville in 2018 by the Departamento de Humanidades y Filosofía at Universidad Loyola Andalucía and the Institute for Advanced Jesuit Studies at Boston College.

In Science and Myth the author shows, in the first place, that science too has its mythology, unrecognized and unacknowledged though the fact be. These scientistic myths, however, turn out to constitute what he terms anti-myths: "a kind that would banish all others, and in so doing, undermine not only religion and morality, but indeed all culture in its higher modes." What invalidates the contemporary "scientific" world-view and renders it "mythical" in the pejorative sense, he goes on to contend, proves finally to be the underlying hypothesis that human perception terminates, not in an external object, but in a subjective phantasm. Not only does the author maintain cogently that visual perception, in particular, does penetrate to the external world, but basing himself on traditional sources-fromVedic to Biblical-he shows that sight as such opens in principle to a veritable gnosis: a "seeing of the Real."