Product Description

A wonderful miraculous book: the whole universe bottled for your delight - Stephen Fry

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #29633 in Books
• Published on: 2009-03-05
• Original language: English
• Binding: Hardcover
• 320 pages

Review
'A marvelously capacious book that will attract serious readers everywhere' --Booklist

Review
'Informative and provocative... Any reader who has avoided science for fear of being overwhelmed will find a friendly guide in Potter'

Review
'Wonderful stuff, the most thoughtful pop science book of the last few years...erudite, elegant and thoughtfully constructed'

Customer Reviews

Comments by Michael Calum Jacques, author of '1st Century Radical'.
This reviewer agrees entirely with the comments and observations of the previous reviewer, Grane, 22March 2009, but simply wishes to add one or two notes to that accurate review.

A former student of mine (in Ancient History and Semitic languages) recently purchased this book imagining it to be some sort of textbook, tracing the development of scientific thinking through the ages. Primarily, it is not that sort of a book. Actually, Christopher Potter readily admits that he is not even a full-blown physicist, although he is not, by any means either, simply the `boy next door'! Rather, he is an accomplished publisher (having been the former boss of the innovative Fourth Estate books) possessing a reasonably strong academic pedigree in the disciplines of Science History and Mathematics.

Rod Liddle in his review in `The Times' notes that Potter functions as "a link between the bizarre and abstruse world of the quantum physicists and our own rather more confined imaginations" and he's absolutely spot on; throughout the 300 or so pages of `You are Here', Potter `facilitates' our encountering and absorbing a genuinely mind-boggling array of data and phenomena.

The book commences with Potter elevating our thoughts beyond the realms of the solar system, even further than `Proxima Centauri' (apparently our closest `star', but still around four light years away), zooming - Fireball XL5 style - "beyond the Milky Way", until, pressing on the very outer reaches of `space', the very periphery of `scale' is approached; in other words, size and dimension are shown to be rendered virtually meaningless by a (quite literally) `star-studded' tour through universe phenomena. It is a very impressive opening section and Potter marshals the inordinately complex data deftly and with considerable alacrity. It sets the reader's mind buzzing.

Throughout the pages Potter also displays a healthy disinclination to simply accept scientific theory at its word and notes that many of its inherent building blocks (such as the semi-existence of virtual particles) are absolutely unobservable and virtually meaningless to the bulk of the population. Such phenomena are merely `theoretical', according to any interpretation of that word. And the book is rarely completely separated from philosophical considerations (the inevitable introspection of the Copenican model, Galileo, Dopler etc) as other reviewers have correctly noted.

This is not the review by a scientist but by someone who has an innate interest in factual history and the resolution of stray data. It is a challenging book and the non-specialist will certainly benefit from having a scientific dictionary (the Penguin one makes a good companion) alongside. That being said, this is a very readable book for most Sixth Form students and beyond and it should be of considerable interest to those who enjoyed works like `A Brief History of Time' by Prof Stephen Hawking. Suffice it to say that I was given this book to look at, have now handed it back, but it's promptly been put on my shopping list!

Michael Calum Jacques

Brilliant - a wonderful debut
A great book that walks you through from the largest distances to very very small things (or non-things), from the beginning of cosmic history to its end(s).

While the book frequently looks at the search for a unifying theory, this book wittingly unifies many disparate areas of knowledge. Potter opens the book with the idea of him as a child trying to write out his full address, the solar system, the milky way, the universe. It does feel like a parent giving shape to our universe. And it will be a good cheat sheet (though, as said in another review, not a good text book) for the questions I will in turn be asked as a parent. It will give me confidence in answering at some point, "we don't know."

Somewhere over the Rainbow
An unique book which lifts you up and beyond the educated layman's horizons of knowledge onto a magical journey between hard wired scientific theories about the earth and our biology. A treatise where the certainty of scientific experimentation is always measured against the fact that science not only creates new perspectives of objectivity but at the same time can and does destroy our selves and our environment. And, often deceives us in the name of Progress. The book is an astonishing synthesis of human intellectual development and the fact that with nothing more than their five senses to play with many of the early Greek philosophers intuitively knew as much as we do today. Don't be intimidated by the breadth of Christopher Potter's knowledge: even if you don't get everything you will end up knowing more than you thought and it is written in inviting, often mischievous prose, and punctuated by illuminating literary references that you may want to hang onto forever.