Word: potterized
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...what tween America feels for the group, because I do know this: Kids need to love things. And when they find something, they love it to pieces. The world is so fresh, their attention so intense, that any object they fix on - a toy, a TV show, the Harry Potter books, a new friend - becomes an object of the deepest, most transporting obsession, the purest form of first love. Anyone who was ever a child knows this; we all went through...
...Here: A Portable History of the Universe By Christopher Potter 304 pages; Harper...
...like to think about the universe because we fear the immensity that is everything," writes Christopher Potter in You Are Here. A former literary publisher, Potter set aside that all-too-common fear and got to writing a layman's guide to the universe, a relatively brief look at how the breadth of scientific theory has evolved since the birth of mankind. Along the way, he makes the case for why scientific inquiry should be engaged in even by non-scientists. "Who can deny the universe when there is so much of it?" (Read "Nicaragua's Vampire Problem...
...Potter sees science as a matter of measurements. Accordingly, he utilizes distance, time, and size as our tour guides. First, we travel outwards from Earth, flying by the planets, over the Kuiper belt, through the Oort cloud (what names!), and past the Orion Nebula, the Hydra-Centaurus supercluster and beyond. Then we venture downward in magnitude - atoms and quarks and gluons and strings and Higgs bosons. There are also journeys forward from the big bang and the creation of Earth. In between, he stuffs his pages with musings on scientific history, philosophy, and personalities...
...book's claim to be a "history of the universe," while not verifiable by the laymen for which Potter writes, at least feels like it might be truer than not. He occasionally gets lost in the weeds - a digression on the many variations of early man (homo ergaster, homo heidelbergansis, etc.) is eye-blurring, and humorously close to tales of Biblical lineage ("...And Isaac begat Jacob, and Jacob begat Judas..."). There's too much in here to internalize on one reading, so - and what more praise does a book need - you're going to have to read it again. Even...