You Are Here: A User's Guide to the Universe
Description
Have you boggled your mind today? **You Are Here** has it all. Literally all, from quantum foam to the Unobservable Universe.
**The star Rigel is nearly a thousand light years away. If California was a thousand light years long, the bacteria between a movie star's teeth would be like clusters of planets.**
_From the Introduction:_
What science tells about our alien world belongs to all of us, and it can be imagined and grasped and understood. One motive I had for writing this book is the sheer irritation I feel when people say lazily that this or that thing is "just too big (or small, or complicated, or weird) to imagineâ€â€”as if that’s a good excuse for what they have done, which is not bother to try. Maybe some things are impossible to imagine, but let’s not give up so easily. Let’s see if we can find ways to imagine them. Because science tells us things about where we live that are, in the most literal sense of that overused word, wonderful... and a universe is a terrible thing to waste.
**If the Milky Way is Boston, and Andromeda is New York City, the giant elliptical galaxy IC 1101 is the whole of North America. On the same scale, our entire solar system out to Neptune is a grain of sugar in Harvard Square.**
EXTRA! Thirty pages of notes on everything from cellular slime molds and rogue waves to Dark Energy and the Linde Universe.
EXTRA EXTRA!! (So exciting, you may have a Lorentz Contraction) "Einstein Sheds Light on Time: The Tale of Zippy the Tourist."
**The star Rigel is nearly a thousand light years away. If California was a thousand light years long, the bacteria between a movie star's teeth would be like clusters of planets.**
_From the Introduction:_
What science tells about our alien world belongs to all of us, and it can be imagined and grasped and understood. One motive I had for writing this book is the sheer irritation I feel when people say lazily that this or that thing is "just too big (or small, or complicated, or weird) to imagineâ€â€”as if that’s a good excuse for what they have done, which is not bother to try. Maybe some things are impossible to imagine, but let’s not give up so easily. Let’s see if we can find ways to imagine them. Because science tells us things about where we live that are, in the most literal sense of that overused word, wonderful... and a universe is a terrible thing to waste.
**If the Milky Way is Boston, and Andromeda is New York City, the giant elliptical galaxy IC 1101 is the whole of North America. On the same scale, our entire solar system out to Neptune is a grain of sugar in Harvard Square.**
EXTRA! Thirty pages of notes on everything from cellular slime molds and rogue waves to Dark Energy and the Linde Universe.
EXTRA EXTRA!! (So exciting, you may have a Lorentz Contraction) "Einstein Sheds Light on Time: The Tale of Zippy the Tourist."
More Books by Richard Farr
