Authors: Bill Bryson
ISBN-13: 9780767908184, ISBN-10: 076790818X
Format: Paperback
Publisher: Crown Publishing Group
Date Published: September 2004
Edition: Reprint
With a wacky worldview -- and wanderlust -- that garners him comparisons to everyone from Chaucer to Dave Barry, Bill Bryson entertains readers around the world with his travelogues and riffs on the intricacies of language.
One of the world s most beloved and bestselling writers takes his ultimate journey -- into the most intriguing and intractable questions that science seeks to answer.
In A Walk in the Woods, Bill Bryson trekked the Appalachian Trail -- well, most of it. In In A Sunburned Country, he confronted some of the most lethal wildlife Australia has to offer. Now, in his biggest book, he confronts his greatest challenge: to understand -- and, if possible, answer -- the oldest, biggest questions we have posed about the universe and ourselves. Taking as territory everything from the Big Bang to the rise of civilization, Bryson seeks to understand how we got from there being nothing at all to there being us. To that end, he has attached himself to a host of the world s most advanced (and often obsessed) archaeologists, anthropologists, and mathematicians, travelling to their offices, laboratories, and field camps. He has read (or tried to read) their books, pestered them with questions,...
Science with a smile.
Acknowledgments | ||
Introduction | 1 | |
Pt. I | Lost in the Cosmos | 7 |
1 | How to Build a Universe | 9 |
2 | Welcome to the Solar System | 19 |
3 | The Reverend Evans's Universe | 29 |
Pt. II | The Size of the Earth | 41 |
4 | The Measure of Things | 43 |
5 | The Stone-Breakers | 63 |
6 | Science Red in Tooth and Claw | 79 |
7 | Elemental Matters | 97 |
Pt. III | A New Age Dawns | 113 |
8 | Einstein's Universe | 115 |
9 | The Mighty Atom | 133 |
10 | Getting the Lead Out | 149 |
11 | Muster Mark's Quarks | 161 |
12 | The Earth Moves | 173 |
Pt. IV | Dangerous Planet | 187 |
13 | Bang! | 189 |
14 | The Fire Below | 207 |
15 | Dangerous Beauty | 224 |
Pt. V | Life Itself | 237 |
16 | Lonely Planet | 239 |
17 | Into the Troposphere | 255 |
18 | The Bounding Main | 270 |
19 | The Rise of Life | 287 |
20 | Small World | 302 |
21 | Life Goes On | 321 |
22 | Good-bye to All That | 335 |
23 | The Richness of Being | 350 |
24 | Cells | 371 |
25 | Darwin's Singular Notion | 381 |
26 | The Stuff of Life | 397 |
Pt. VI | The Road to Us | 417 |
27 | Ice Time | 419 |
28 | The Mysterious Biped | 434 |
29 | The Restless Ape | 453 |
30 | Good-bye | 469 |
Notes | 479 | |
Bibliography | 517 | |
Index | 529 |