Almost Everyone's Guide to Science: The Universe, Life and Everything [Hardcover]

Dr. John Gribbin (Author), Mary Gribbin (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 10, 1999

For anyone interested in the remarkable achievements and discoveries of modern science--but intimidated by confusing technical detail--this book offers the perfect solution. Award-winning author John Gribbin stands back from the details and offers a broad picture of science, from the structure of particles within the atom to the birth of the universe. With eloquent clarity, Gribbin explains the simple rules that govern the physical world.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Science isn't for everyone, but if you have even the faintest trace of curiosity about the world around you, Almost Everyone's Guide to Science will be a delight. Author John Gribbin, a cosmologist by training, is better known for writing such popularizations of the freaky world of 20th-century physics as In Search of Schrödinger's Cat. His choice of subjects for this latest project reaches new territory, expanding in breadth to cover not just physics but chemistry, geology, meteorology, and the life sciences as well; in short, he introduces the world as we know it. Challenging but not intimidating, his writing presumes an actively intelligent reader willing to pause and think things out from time to time. Like the best science writers, he knows that his characters are people like Einstein and Darwin rather than theories like relativity and natural selection. This human-centered writing style is absorbing and a little sneaky--even those readers pathologically resistant to retaining scientific information will find themselves startled once or twice by an odd paradox or brilliant insight. This mastery of storytelling is ultimately what sets Gribbin apart from most other science writers; if you've decided that it's time to survey what we know about the world, Almost Everyone's Guide to Science is the best place to start. --Rob Lightner

From Publishers Weekly

Any book attempting to explain topics as diverse as the inner workings of atoms and the origin of the universe, as well as everything in between, is bound to be superficial. Gribbin's is that, but it is also informative, providing a knowing, if idiosyncratic, view of many of the major contemporary issues in science. Gribbin (In Search of Schr?dinger's Cat, etc.) has written "a guide not so much for fans of science and the cognoscenti but more a guide for the perplexedAanyone who is vaguely aware that science is important, and might even be interesting, but is usually scared off by the technical detail." He begins by paying attention to the work of physicists and their view of the atom, moving sequentially to chemists, biologists, geologists, meteorologists, astronomers and cosmologists. Topics as diverse as the nature of chemical bonds, the structure of biological molecules, evolution, plate tectonics, the greenhouse effect, stellar evolution and the big bang all touched on. Throughout, Gribbin emphasizes fundamentals of science and of the scientific methodAparticularly through the mantra, "if it disagrees with experiment it is wrong." Overall, this is a good bet for the would-be weekend scientist who favors breadth over depth and wants to know a lot in little time.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 240 pages
• Publisher: Yale University Press (September 10, 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0300081014
• ISBN-13: 978-0300081015
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.2 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (8 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #193,990 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

21 of 21 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A Fun Read--Yes, believe it!, February 9, 2000

By 

Mitchell D. Erickson (New Jersey) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Almost Everyone's Guide to Science: The Universe, Life and Everything (Hardcover)

Science books are generally drab, inpenetrable, and long. Gribbins' book is none of these. I found the book quite readable. The most complex scientific concepts are described in sufficient detail to tell the story, yet with clarity. He avoids math, chemical formulae, and jargon.

Many scientific overview books, particularly those with sweeping titles such as this, are lengthy to the point of being imposing. At 220 pp, this is an easy read over a few days.

If you're interested in understanding science from strings at 10E-35 meters to the size/age of the universe, you'll enjoy this book. As a chemist, it was illuminating to get a perspective on the other disciplines and scales of our universe.

15 of 17 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Not a good book for beginners., August 24, 2005

By 

James Bentley (East Yorkshire, Great Britain) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Almost Everyone's Guide to Science: The Universe, Life and Everything (Hardcover)

I like John Gribbin's books a lot. I have ten of them. I've read them all, some of them a few times.

However, this is not a good book for beginners. No attempt has been made by either author or publisher to present science to a non-scientific audience. The book consists of block text from beginning to end. There are no illustrations and no diagrams. Many scientific terms are used without any explanation of their meaning, and the style of writing is not simple.

John Gribbin is a very prolific author, he has just rattled off another book, and someone has thought of a catchy title for it.

Having said this, there is a lot of interesting material in this book. I'll be keeping my copy and re-reading it. But "almost everyone's guide to science" it certainly isn't.

A much easier book by John Gribbin is 'Stardust', which is about the way in which the elements that make up everything around us are themselves made in stars - hence we are all stardust!

If you want an excellent introduction to biology please be sure to look up a marvellous book called 'Exploring the Way Life Works' by Mahlon Hoagland et al which has received justifiably ecstatic reviews here on Amazon.

28 of 35 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Book Review No. 32, February 24, 2000

By 

James L. Grubb "[e-mail]" (Scottsdale, AZ) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Almost Everyone's Guide to Science: The Universe, Life and Everything (Hardcover)

This is a best-seller by an eminent scientist who doesn't believe the world is goverened by magic or the supernatural.He presents scientific evidence that everything is coherent and fits together. Gribbin starts with the smallest particle and goes to the birth of the universe including the origin of our species. This is an ambitious, never-tried-before book. It is breathtaking in scope.Don't bother to read it if you don't have a healthy curiosity or the patience to put up with complicated scientific concepts. And don't worry about not understanding all of it; what you do understand will stagger you.

Interesting ideas: People are the most complex systems in the known universe. No two are exactly alike. Studies confirm tha tNinety-eight per cent of the DNA in human beings, gorillas and chimpanzees is the same...the differences tha tmake us uniquely human amount to a little over one per cent. We are one per cent human and roughly 99 per cent ape.

If our planet were the size of a basketball, the thickness of the breathable atmosphere would be no more than one quarter of a millimeter, a barely noticeable 6-mile-high smear over the surface of the ball. The Earth is a ball of rock covered by a thin smear of atmosphere and ocean.

In about ten billion years the Sun will cool into a solid lump. About 440 billion years ago there was a massive extinction of life on earth. Stray pieces of cosmic debris still collide with planets and one impact contributed to the death of dinosaurs about 65 million years ago.

Fine-particle scientists predict the existence of different kinds of particles from anything we have seen yet. They have not been detected, but have been given names such as photonios. This class of objects is referred to as Weakly Interacting Massive Particles or WIMPs because they have mass, but don't interact very strongly with everyday matter.Astronometers and Particle Scientists would like to detect these mysterious particles directly and this may happen within the next few years. Models suggest we are swimming in a sea of WIMPs, possibly a plausible explanation of the so-called spirit world.

This work is a monumental job of setting down that which, in scientific circles, is called the "Theory of Everything" (TOE) for all to understand. Gribbin has summed up the last 400 years of scientific thinking on where we came from, and where we are going, if that is of interest to you.

Jim Grubb [e-mail]