You Are Here: A Portable History of the Universe by Christopher Potter (PDF)

Description

“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.” — TimeChristopher 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.

User’s Reviews

Editorial Reviews: From Publishers Weekly Starred Review. Any reader who has avoided science for fear of being overwhelmed will find a friendly guide in Potter, former publisher of Fourth Estate who has a masters in the history and philosophy of science. He addresses the issue head-on by turning the problem into one of scale, taking readers outward in a literary Powers of 10 journey. From meters through kilometers to light-years, Potter takes readers beyond Earth’s atmosphere, across the solar system and into deep space, where galaxies gather into vast superclusters. After this headlong rush, Potter offers a quick history of physics and a look at the quarks and gluons at the heart of matter. A quantum mechanics chaser segues into an intimate examination of the Big Bang and stellar formation to the coalescence of our own solar system and, finally, the evolution of life on the speck we call Earth. Giving equal weight to each topic, Potter’s steady progression illuminates the ways in which they are all connected. This clear and smoothly written look at the mind-boggling history of everything is both informative and provocative. 10 b&w illus. (Mar.) Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. From The New Yorker Those for whom particle physics and string theory are impenetrable mysteries may not be entirely enlightened by Potter’s genial exegesis of the mysteries of the universe, in which quarks, squarks, and “vibrating lengths of pure energy” are elegantly expounded but remain irreducibly conceptual. Still, he gives a foothold to the floundering with evocative description—“A beard grows a few nanometres in the time taken to raise a razor to the skin”—and with liberal doses of trivia. Among other things, he notes that the moon was formed when a huge planetary collision blew the crust of the earth into the atmosphere, and that the human body contains ten times as many bacterial cells as human ones. Most compellingly, Potter examines the provisional nature of scientific inquiry, in which conjecture can lead to insight and a weakness of a hypothesis can become a strength. Copyright ©2008 Click here to subscribe to The New Yorker From Booklist *Starred Review* Sixteen hundred years after Augustine pondered the origins of time in the Creation, Potter probes that mystery from a modern scientific perspective. That perspective allows readers to trace the flight of time’s arrow from the big bang, 13 billion years ago, into a cold, lifeless “Dark Era” trillions of years from now. Few intellectual adventures can match the thrill of riding this arrow as it speeds out of the fiery primal explosion that generates the rapidly inflating expanse of space. Readers marvel as energy-charged bubbles of quantum foam inexplicably metamorphose into radiant galaxies, and the riddles intensify as the temporal arrow flies above a magical blue-green planet on which myriad plant and animal species emerge and evolve. Potter sharpens his analysis when a curious hominid appears on the African savannahs, a species uniquely endowed with the capacity to contemplate its own place among the stars and the ability to chronicle its own origins. As he reflects on this strange species, Potter confronts the paradox of science as an enterprise that denies Homo sapiens any special status in the universe yet proceeds only because of godlike reasoning abilities found in no other creatures. A marvelously capacious book that will attract serious readers everywhere. From the Back Cover You Are Here is a dazzling exploration of the universe and our relationship to it, as seen through the lens of today’s most cutting-edge scientific thinking. Christopher Potter brilliantly parses the meaning of what we call the universe. He tells the story of how something evolved from nothing and how something became everything. What does a material description of everything and nothing look like? What is it that science does when it describes a reality that is made out of something? In between nothing and everything is where we live. Here, for the first time in a single span, is the life of the universe, from quarks to galaxy superclusters and from slime to Homo sapiens. The universe was once a moment of perfect symmetry and is now 13.7 billion years of history. Clouds of gas were woven into whatever complexity we find in the universe today: the hierarchies of stars or the brains of mammals. Potter writes entertainingly about the history and philosophy of science, and he shows that science advances by continually removing humankind from a position of primacy in the universe, but the universe responds by placing us back there again.With wisdom and wonder, Potter traverses the cosmos from its conception to its eventual end—while exploring everything in between. About the Author Christopher Potter is the former publisher and managing director of 4th Estate. He lives in London and New York City. Read more

Reviews from Amazon users which were colected at the time this book was published on the website:

⭐One sign of a really special book is this: as I approach the end of it, I begin to realize that it is so full of valuable knowledge and wisdom that I must read it again. In this work the range of subjects covered, the quality of the writing, the sense of both expert intelligence and youthful wonder is all pretty breathtaking. In this short book, Potter sets out to cover the current state of human knowledge of the universe. He goes over everything from the most minute particles to the grandest theories of the multiverse. He provides facts, lets us in on debates, traces the histories of key developments, and points out where there still is work to be done. The pace is quick, and the author the author never allows things to become too academic for the average reader and yet does not insult our intelligence by dumbing things down too much. It would be doing a disservice to begin pointing out some of the things covered here – it would be better to pick up the book.We are long past the days of Leonardo and science is of course a collection of highly specialized fields, each with their own vocabulary and concepts. This book is written primarily for the reasonably well-educated lay reader who would like to learn some more about what is known about the universe we live in. It was just the book that I had been looking for – only now I feel like I have to read it again.

⭐I am a layman, yet I still find science a very interesting subject. After reading Bill Bryson’s “A Short History of Nearly Everything” I wanted to see another authors perspective, but still remain in the “layman” catagory. Some people dislike Bryson and his book for the very reason I love it and that is his dry humor and unusual anecdotes, and while I did not necessarily expect all the same from Mr. Potter and his book I was taken in with book reviews claming it was both for the layman and amusing at times. I went in expecting the best but unfortunately got the worse of it. There are some interesting facts, which is why I give two stars not one star, but alas Mr. Potter buries it all in tedious wording and a highly unusal fascination with philosophy. The first 4 chapters or so are just ramble after ramble of verbose and wordy sentances and the rest of the chapters while turning more to facts are still just as bad and make the whole thing a very tedious read. I am dead honest when I say that over the course of two days as I read this book I found myself starting to nod off…SERIOUSLY! I so very much wanted to like this book, I really really did or I would not have spent hard earned money for it. I gave it up until over 200 pages, but in the end I am giving up. I just can’t finish the book, and that says a lot since I am the kind of person who hates to NOT finish a book (I have only had 5…now 6…books in my life I could not get compltetly through and I can name each one, and this considering I read on average 2-5 books a month and have done so for the last 20 years). I truly hope others enjoy this book, but I simply could not.

⭐Just about everyone who enjoys reading about science will enjoy this book. The subtitle, “A Portable History of the Universe”, indicates how ambitious the author’s goal was in writing the book. I can give no higher praise than to say that he succeeds. The combination of depth, breadth, and conciseness is amazing. Each page provides food for thought.Here are just some of the topics covered in the book:o A history of the philosophy of scienceo The origins of Relativity and Quantum Theoryo The Standard Model of Particle Physicso String Theoryo The history of the universe from the first tiny fraction of the first secondo How stars are formed, destroyed, and re-formedo Evolution in generalo Geological history and mass extinctiono Human evolutionOver the last few centuries, scientific understanding has often worked to remove ourselves from a privileged place in the universe and to diminish the awe and wonder we experience as we contemplate our existence. “You Are Here” succeeds in restoring awe and wonder and fittingly ends with an apt quote from Freeman Dyson: `Mind is woven into the fabric of the universe’.

⭐This is an excellent book and it does delve into several topics in science, including nuclear physics, astronomy, ancient geology, evolution, etc. It is, as if, Mr Potter compiled many Wikipedia articles on science and then organized them into one big glob of fascinating scientific knowledge. Whatever, he did a splendid job – a enjoyable and readable book. I only wished that I had read it with a yellow marker in order to highlight some interesting facts (eg, our speed for the rotation of the earth, the earth’s velocity around the sun, the sun’s velocity in the Milky Way, etc.). This certainly spices up the read and makes it entertaining – the element that makes it so appealing for the lay reader.

⭐This book is awful. So bad that I wondered how I got enticed into purchasing it. I’m glad I got it through BookBub for 2 dollars. I’m still only part way through it, maybe a third, and I started looking at the reviews of it. Yesterday, I saw people loved it; today, I added the search “errors” and found like-minded individuals. I have been trained as a particle physicist, so I do have some expectations. Some glaring errors I found: presuming that since the story of Galileo dropping balls from the leaning tower isn’t true but is apocryphal, that he didn’t conduct experiments at all. Another is, neglecting that Galileo’s most significant evidence against the Geocentric Model is his observations of Venus, and then to say that one can add more epicycles to the Ptolematic Model making the observations work, you just can’t get a “full” Venus in a geocentric model. The last one I’ve read is that somehow, by looking at a radioactive substance, I can make it wait to decay! I’ve now read some other reviews and they suggest this is just a collection of Wikipedia articles mashed together.

⭐Christopher Potter tells an engaging story about the smallness of physics and the large-scale of astronomical units. He explains atoms, electrons and compares it with the hugeness of the solar system and universes that are out there.

⭐It arrived fast,everything ok…thx.

⭐I know because I am already past my due date

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