blueyorkie's review against another edition
5.0
According to Lucretius, the infinitely small perception is only a ray of light, allowing elementary particles to meet and repel each other without any original affinity.
The particles move, collide, unite and separate, uniquely formatted by the chance of encounters having no meaning.
The infinitely small, random number Pi is only an aggregate of forms disappearing and reborn according to their paths and impacts as absurd as unforeseeable.
No need to analyse each result; they mean nothing. Each product results from a quantum wind grouping together a corpuscular all-comer without a mind. Each element, like a pinball ball, reveals different imagery in its contingent projections.
No plan, no garden of Eden, no promised land.
No life after death. When the body extinguishes, the soul had also ruined.
There's nothing to conquer or defend in an infinitely small, under the influence of its inconsistent pilings.
Reading is a real ordeal for a believer whose pillars crumble page after page.
Fire, missals, Bibles and Gospels since everything, according to Lucretius, is only a disordered world without gods developing an incomprehensible order.
How to accept to disappear in smoke without the hope of a beyond? First, remove the cause and effect.
Still, life is nothing else by maintaining the course of its values in the middle of the imponderable drift of the elements.
The particles move, collide, unite and separate, uniquely formatted by the chance of encounters having no meaning.
The infinitely small, random number Pi is only an aggregate of forms disappearing and reborn according to their paths and impacts as absurd as unforeseeable.
No need to analyse each result; they mean nothing. Each product results from a quantum wind grouping together a corpuscular all-comer without a mind. Each element, like a pinball ball, reveals different imagery in its contingent projections.
No plan, no garden of Eden, no promised land.
No life after death. When the body extinguishes, the soul had also ruined.
There's nothing to conquer or defend in an infinitely small, under the influence of its inconsistent pilings.
Reading is a real ordeal for a believer whose pillars crumble page after page.
Fire, missals, Bibles and Gospels since everything, according to Lucretius, is only a disordered world without gods developing an incomprehensible order.
How to accept to disappear in smoke without the hope of a beyond? First, remove the cause and effect.
Still, life is nothing else by maintaining the course of its values in the middle of the imponderable drift of the elements.
aria_izikdzurko's review against another edition
2.0
The first chapter was promising, offering astute observations on human nature… but the later chapters digressed into unscientific explanations of natural phenomena which have been much better and more accurately explained in modern times. Overall, some points were made that were impressively relevant to our modern era, but I had a hard time appreciating the writing itself, which was convoluted and bogged down by boring examples and diversions (this was perhaps because of the translation)
nwhyte's review against another edition
4.0
http://nwhyte.livejournal.com/1391691.html
This is one of the best-argued cases for atheism I have read (speaking as a non-atheist). Millennia before Dawkins, Hitchens, or even Bertrand Russell, Lucretius argued the nature of the universe from first principles, concluding vigorously that there is no God and no afterlife, just matter made of atoms. There is no tedious sniping at current beliefs (apart from a rather funny bit towards the end about why Jupiter does not hurl thunderbolts; and he has a go also at the beliefs of Heraclitus and Empedocles about elements), just an explanation in detail of the philosophy of Epicurus and how that helps us understand the way the world around us works. As with all such books, it is tempting to give the author marks out of ten for the accuracy of his scientific explanations as compared to our current understanding, but that would be a mistake; it is amazing how far Lucretius got given his starting point. It reminded me a bit of Bill Bryson's A Short History of Nearly Everything, but is of course much shorter; also Lucretius, writing in 55 BC or thereabouts, had two millennia less of scientific research to fit in. Unfortunately he doesn't appear to have finished it; the text ends rather abruptly after a description of the effects of plague.
This is one of the best-argued cases for atheism I have read (speaking as a non-atheist). Millennia before Dawkins, Hitchens, or even Bertrand Russell, Lucretius argued the nature of the universe from first principles, concluding vigorously that there is no God and no afterlife, just matter made of atoms. There is no tedious sniping at current beliefs (apart from a rather funny bit towards the end about why Jupiter does not hurl thunderbolts; and he has a go also at the beliefs of Heraclitus and Empedocles about elements), just an explanation in detail of the philosophy of Epicurus and how that helps us understand the way the world around us works. As with all such books, it is tempting to give the author marks out of ten for the accuracy of his scientific explanations as compared to our current understanding, but that would be a mistake; it is amazing how far Lucretius got given his starting point. It reminded me a bit of Bill Bryson's A Short History of Nearly Everything, but is of course much shorter; also Lucretius, writing in 55 BC or thereabouts, had two millennia less of scientific research to fit in. Unfortunately he doesn't appear to have finished it; the text ends rather abruptly after a description of the effects of plague.
megan_eightball's review against another edition
I'm glad to know about Lucretius and epicureanism. I'm not sure how much I got out of reading it versus reading the introduction summary and hearing from others what was in it. It has bursts of impressive, interesting stuff, but it was interspersed with lots of wrong explanations of weather phenomena and things. I started with the Copley translation (which is in poem form) but switched halfway through to the Latham translation (prose) which I found easier to process.
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