The title Close to Man is the cry of the timeless scientist who seeks the humanitarian meaning of the interests he has chosen to serve, a tracker of the natural world and human existence who agonizes over the meaning and value of science; it is the spiritual pain of a soul that senses the deviation from the ideal, of a soul that is torn before the painful dilemma of the need for religious faith and its inability to accept that faith without betraying the norms of reason.

Under the title Close to Man are two exceptional works by the Nobel Prize-winning Austrian physicist Erwin Schrödinger: his book Science and Humanism (published in 1951, including the central theme of the lectures he gave at University College Dublin in February 1950), and the book My Worldview, which was completed by the author a few months before his death and remained unpublished for several years.

[Excerpt from the text on the back cover of the edition]