The “third apple” is the third culture, i.e. all the references and connections between science and humanism, including literature and the figurative arts.
Science comes into the novel without that clear division between scientific culture and humanistic culture that was the focus of a bitter debate at the end of the Fifties.
From Alice in Wonderland to the oddities of summation, from the categorisation of scientific discoveries using the tools of fairy tales (as taught by Vladirim Propp) to the fractal perspective of novels and the crucial role of metaphor in scientific proof – this book delivers all this and much more. A perfect example of the third culture is the discovery of gravitational waves coming from remote time and space. They are a watershed discovery in modern science and tie in with what Kepler and, much earlier, the Pythagoreans used to call the Universe’s music.