The Earth: From Myths to Knowledge - Tapa blanda

"Clear and fascinating." La Quinzaine litteraire "A wonderful reflection on science." Mediapart "An excellent book of popular science, written in a straightforward, accessible style." Jean Bricmont, Le Monde Diplomatique

Are we entitled to say that Earth is 4.55 billion years old, and its trajectory an ellipse centered on the Sun, with an average radius of 150 million kilometers? Most educated people today would say yes. Curiously, however, three hundred years after the century of Enlightenment, the fact that these assertions constitute what it is customary to call "scientific truths" is often perceived, especially by postmodernists, as naive, improper or even (paradoxically) wrong. Against the fashionable relativist idea that science is no more than a socially constructed doxa, and reality nothing more than what we ourselves bring to it, this straightforward yet highly vigorous book rehabilitates a supposedly outdated, naively realist notion "scientific truth."