HALDANE, J. B. S. Possible Worlds and other Essays. London: Chatto & Windus. 1927.
8vo. Original cloth, spine ruled and lettered in gilt, original wrapper printed in red and black, retaining price; pp. viii, 312, [4, publisher's catalogue]; wrapper a little spotted and with minor marginal flaws, initials in ink to front fly-leaf, light toning to endpapers; else a very good copy.
Very rare first edition, first printing, with the even rarer wrappers. John Burdon Sanderson Haldane, without any higher scientific degree, became one of the leading geneticists and lecturers at Cambridge who coined the terms clone and cloning. He reconciled Darwinian evolutionary theory with Mendel's genetics. A public speaker and radical polymath, his influence reached from Aldous Huxley (Brave New World) to science fiction writers such as Arthur C. Clarke, who called Haldane "perhaps the most brilliant science populariser of his generation". For others he was simply a phenomenal mind and was described as "the last man who might know all there was to be known".
This collection of essays assesses the boundaries and the breaking of these manifested in the fast development of the sciences in the roaring 1920s. Long before the proposal and discovery of genetic engineering, antimatter, black holes, the big bang theory and machine learning Haldane envisages possible concepts of understanding the world that do not conform with Newtonian theory and perceived wisdom. In the last paragraph of the title essay of this volume he writes "It is my suspicion that the universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose" (p. 286).
SKU: 2124105