The Universe Within: A Scientific Adventure - Couverture rigide

Shubin, Neil

Couverture rigide

ISBN 10 : 1846142202 ISBN 13 : 9781846142208

Editeur : Allen Lane, 2013

Synopsis

The Universe within During the past 13.7 billion years (or so) since the Big Bang, our universe has evolved, stars have formed and died and our planet congealed from the matter in space. In this title, the author reveals to us the extraordinary cosmic and evolutionary adventure of our own bodies. Full description

A propos du livre

Extrait

Prologue
 
Having spent the better part of my working life staring at rocks on the ground, I’ve gained a certain perspective on life and the universe. My professional aspiration—uncovering clues to the making of our bodies—lies inside the baked desert floor or deep within the frozen Arctic. While this ambition may seem eccentric, it is not much different from that of colleagues who peer at the light of distant stars and galaxies, map the bottom of the oceans, or chart the surface of barren planets in our solar system. What weaves our work together are some of the most powerful ideas that mankind has ever developed, ones that can explain how we and our world came to be.
 
These notions inspired my first book, Your Inner Fish. Inside every organ, cell, and piece of DNA in our bodies lie over 3.5 billion years of the history of life. Accordingly, clues to the human story reside within impressions of worms in rock, the DNA of fish, and clumps of algae in a pond.
 
While I was thinking about that book, it became clear that worms, fish, and algae are but gateways to ever deeper connections—ones that extend back billions of years before the presence of life and of Earth itself. Written inside us is the birth of the stars, the movement of heavenly bodies across the sky, even the origin of days themselves.
 
During the past 13.7 billion years (or so), the universe came about in the big bang, stars have formed and died, and our planet congealed from matter in space. In the eons since, Earth has circled the sun while mountains, seas, and whole continents have come and gone.
 
Discovery after discovery in the past century has confirmed the multibillion-year age of Earth, the sheer vastness of the cosmos, and our species’ humble position in the tree of life on our planet. Against this backdrop, you could legitimately wonder if it is part of the job description of scientists to make people feel utterly puny and insignificant in the face of the enormity of space and time.
 
But by smashing the smallest atoms and surveying the largest galaxies, exploring rocks on the highest mountains and in the deepest seas, and coming to terms with the DNA inside every species alive today, we uncover a sublimely beautiful truth. Within each of us lie some of the most profound stories of all.

Présentation de l'éditeur

In The Universe Within, Neil Shubin, one of the world's leading experts, reveals to us the extraordinary cosmic and evolutionary adventure of our own bodies.During the past 13.7 billion years (or so) since the Big Bang, our universe has evolved, stars have formed and died and our planet congealed from the matter in space. For aeons, the earth has circled the sun while mountains, seas and entire continents have come and gone. Against this epic backdrop, humanity's place in the cosmos can look tiny and insignificant. But as Neil Shubin shows in this revelatory new book, the one place where universe, solar system and planet merge is inside your body. Shubin shows how the origin of the Moon is tied to our internal body clocks; how the vast amounts of water on Earth and inside all living creatures crossed the deepest stretches of space to us; how strange fluctuations in the orbits within our solar system have led to our irregular ice-ages; and how tiny imbalances in the chaos immediately after the Big Bang can explain why matter exists at all.Delving below the earth's surface and into the frozen Arctic, exploring the smallest atomic structures and the vast reaches of space, Neil Shubin uncovers a sublimely beautiful, almost magical truth: that in every one of us lies the most profound story of all - how we and our world came to be.'Shubin is not only a distinguished scientist, but a wonderfully lucid and elegant writer; he is an irrepressibly enthusiastic teacher ... a science writer of the first rank', Oliver SacksNeil Shubin is a palaeontologist in the great tradition of his mentors, Ernst Mayr and Stephen Jay Gould. He has discovered fossils around the world that have changed the way we think about many of the key transitions in evolution and has pioneered a new synthesis of expeditionary palaeontology, developmental genetics and genomics. He trained at Columbia, Harvard and Berkeley and is currently a Professor in the Department of Organismal Biology and Anatomy at the University of Chicago. His previous book is Your Inner Fish: The amazing discovery of our 375-million-year-old ancestor.

À propos de cette édition

• Éditeur: Allen Lane
• Date d'édition: 2013
• ISBN 10: 1846142202
• ISBN 13: 9781846142208
• Reliure: Relié
• Nombre de pages: 240