Norbert Duerichen

Skip: from Common Sense to Cosmology Norbert Duerichen

Skip: Common Sense to Cosmology is both a story and a treatise on common sense. It hypothesizes that literacy may have contributed to our estrangement from the real world and the intelligence with which we have learned to survive in it. Through a series of snapshots that follow the life of an illiterate person this book explores preliterary thought and the hypothesis that an oral culture is more soundly founded in common sense than is a literary culture, speech being a more direct method of communicating thoughts than is the written word. Most of the episodes or snapshots are taken from real life. They offer a 'feel' of what pioneer life was like during the 50s in the Central Interior of British Columbia. Interwoven with the descriptions and story a critique of this way of life is developed, with a continual reference to the common sense theme. The novel culminates with a critique of the Theory of Relativity, this theory being the inception of science's violation of common sense, sanctioned by the claim that common sense is a human limitation that must be transcended in order to comprehend the cosmos. The author offers some alternative interpretations of those historic discoveries that led us down the road of Relativity Theory.