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    You Are Here: A Portable History of the Universe
    Unavailable
    You Are Here: A Portable History of the Universe
    Unavailable
    You Are Here: A Portable History of the Universe
    Ebook386 pages9 hours

    You Are Here: A Portable History of the Universe

    By Christopher Potter

    4/5

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    Currently unavailable

    About this ebook

    “You Are Here is not just physics for poets, but as close to poetry or music as science is ever likely to get. Christopher Potter’s narrative is as imaginative, ingenious, and elegantly concise as it is user-friendly.” — Sylvia Nasar, author of A Beautiful Mind

    “A personal, brilliant, and often amusing account . . . . An idiosyncratic, encyclopedic blitzkrieg of a book.” —The Boston Globe

    “The Verdict: Read.” — Time

    Christopher Potter’s You Are Here is a lively and accessible biography of the universe—how it fits together and how we fit into it—in the style of science writers like Richard Dawkins, Bill Bryson, and Richard Feynman, as seen through the lens of today’s most cutting-edge scientific thinking.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarperCollins
    Release dateOct 6, 2009
    ISBN9780061973178
    Unavailable
    You Are Here: A Portable History of the Universe
    Author

    Christopher Potter

    Christopher Potter spent almost a quarter of a century in publishing, over 17 of those years at the independent publishing house Fourth Estate, where he became publisher and managing director. His first book was the much-praised ‘You Are Here, A Portable History of the Universe’. ‘How To Make a Human Being’ is his second.

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    Reviews for You Are Here

    4/5

    31 ratings2 reviews

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    • 3/5
      A lucid, readable explanation of the physics of the universe. The author does a particularly good job of explaining relativity in easy to understand terms, which is a valuable service. I did find the approach of the book somewhat unedifying and, in many places, dull, as he carried out his ever increasing discussions of size and time. I think there are other ways this could have been approached which would have been more interesting and compelling. I also thought some of his ruminations on science, philosophy, and religion were a bit mushy and light-headed for someone who had written such a strongly evidence-based science book. I do agree that science needs philosophy, and vice versa, but the author makes no compelling argument as to why science needs religion; indeed, he basically just makes statements that are not supported by anything that could be called logical argumentation. He appears to just assume the reader will accept his formulations. This is not acceptable in a book dealing with topics that so require critical thinking to understand. Mysticism has pervaded way too much of physics in recent years, and would have been much better left out of this work altogether. And the quote from Jastrow in the final chapter about science climbing a peak and finding theologians have been there for centuries is laughable, particularly coming as it does at the end of a book that has provided plenty of evidence to the contrary, but doesn't seem to recognize it. In fact, every time scientists climb a peak, they find it was the Greeks, or the Egyptians, or some other early civilization that was there before, or that the peak is empty, and just now being conquered. They then yank the theologians along by the hair of their head, with them (the theologians) kicking and screaming the whole way until they finally reach the peak; then, those same theologians assume the moral high ground, and claim they were there all along, even when the historical records plainly dictate otherwise. And there will always be someone like this author perfectly willing to play their game, take them at their word, and gamely help them create new truths out of whole cloth.
    • 3/5
      A lucid, readable explanation of the physics of the universe. The author does a particularly good job of explaining relativity in easy to understand terms, which is a valuable service. I did find the approach of the book somewhat unedifying and, in many places, dull, as he carried out his ever increasing discussions of size and time. I think there are other ways this could have been approached which would have been more interesting and compelling. I also thought some of his ruminations on science, philosophy, and religion were a bit mushy and light-headed for someone who had written such a strongly evidence-based science book. I do agree that science needs philosophy, and vice versa, but the author makes no compelling argument as to why science needs religion; indeed, he basically just makes statements that are not supported by anything that could be called logical argumentation. He appears to just assume the reader will accept his formulations. This is not acceptable in a book dealing with topics that so require critical thinking to understand. Mysticism has pervaded way too much of physics in recent years, and would have been much better left out of this work altogether. And the quote from Jastrow in the final chapter about science climbing a peak and finding theologians have been there for centuries is laughable, particularly coming as it does at the end of a book that has provided plenty of evidence to the contrary, but doesn't seem to recognize it. In fact, every time scientists climb a peak, they find it was the Greeks, or the Egyptians, or some other early civilization that was there before, or that the peak is empty, and just now being conquered. They then yank the theologians along by the hair of their head, with them (the theologians) kicking and screaming the whole way until they finally reach the peak; then, those same theologians assume the moral high ground, and claim they were there all along, even when the historical records plainly dictate otherwise. And there will always be someone like this author perfectly willing to play their game, take them at their word, and gamely help them create new truths out of whole cloth.