The book takes us from the clumsy inquisitiveness of an upstart paramecium searching for food several hundred million years ago to the restless seeking that propelled big-brained Homo sapiens into the space age. In Asimov’s New Guide to Science (first published as The Intelligent Man’s Guide to Science in 1960), he wonderfully characterized the deep history of life on Earth as an adventure of curiosity. The leitmotif of his life was an unstinting thirst for knowledge. As a scientist, he was a popularizer who often drew comparisons with H. Life of wonderĪsimov was central to science fiction’s Golden Age, as the writer of iconic works such as I, Robot (1950), the Foundation series and The Gods Themselves (1972). It was an ethos he promoted through 20 million printed words.

Advance in these arenas is often synergistic, and scientists can “make great leaps into new realms of knowledge by looking upon the universe with the eyes of artists”.įor Asimov, nurturing ingenuity and insight through exploration, learning and communication was an ethical imperative and crucial for human progress. As he wrote in the gemlike 1978 essay ‘Art and Science’, the artist’s work suffers if knowledge is deficient the scientist’s suffers if leaps of intuition, which so often outpace the leaden trot of rationality, are ignored. Throughout, Asimov razed the make-believe boundary between imagination and reason. They spanned the rich microscopic worlds of cytoplasm, cells and subatomic particles, and ventured into the boundless wilds of space. He wrote and edited around 500 books and penned myriad stories, articles and essays. Is Earthrise a product of science or a work of art? Isaac Asimov, the Russian-born chemist and science-fiction colossus (1920–92), had an answer: the two are, in fact, the same.Īsimov spent more than half of the twentieth century cultivating that transformative unity of art and science. The picture, now known as Earthrise, became one of the most iconic images in human history - later credited with catalysing the environmental movement. On 24 December 1968, astronaut William Anders took a photograph of Earth from the observation window of Apollo 8. Isaac Asimov in 1982 on Ellis Island, New York.

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