Print: Original
In
Rutherford and Fry’s comprehensive guidebook, they tell the complete
story of the universe and absolutely everything in it – skipping over
some of the boring parts. This is a celebration of the weirdness of the
cosmos, the strangeness of humans and the fact that amid all the mess,
we can somehow make sense of life.
Our brains have evolved to
tell us all sorts of things that feel intuitively right but just aren’t
true: the world looks flat, the stars seem fixed in the heavenly
firmament, a day is 24 hours… This book is crammed full of tales of how
stuff really works. With
the power of science, Rutherford and Fry show us how to bypass our
monkey-brains, taking us on a journey from the origin of time and space,
via planets, galaxies, evolution, the dinosaurs, all the way into our
minds, and wrestling with some truly head-scratching questions that only
science can answer:
What is time, and where does it come from?
Why are animals the size and shape they are?
What is a thought?
How horoscopes work (Spoiler: they don’t, but you think they do)
Does my dog love me?
Why nothing is truly round
Do you need your eyes to see?