Customer Reviews

Almost Everyone's Guide to Science: The Universe, Life and Everything (Yale Nota Bene)

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

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.

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.

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 grubb@uswest.net

John Gribbin quotes Einstein at one point, saying "the eternal mystery of the world is its comprehnsibility . . . the fact that it is comprehensible is a miracle."

Too few of us take the time to look at the world and the universe around us and simply gasp in amazement. It all works. Not only are you an amazing work but so is everything else.

John Gribbin sets out to explain everything: atoms, molecules, living things, rocks, dirt, stars and more. And he does a pretty good job of it.

As he states in his introduction, he takes you from the world of the very, very small to and then into the Universe. Along the way he covers life in general, DNA, evolution, stars, planets and lots more.

For the dedicated reader, Gribbin makes science accessible and comprehensible. On occasion, you may have to reread a paragraph or even an entire section, but Gribbin never goes beyond a layperson's capability even when explaining the most complex subjects.

Jerry

I really enjoyed reading this book. Especially the end where it discusses planets, space, and how everything came together. It's amazing how much we puny humans can figure out about a star half way across the galaxy.

The one thing that held this book back from getting a perfect 5/5, is the fact that it had _no_ pictures to help explain the concepts. This was very annoying, but it does force the reader to visualize concepts in his/her head.

Over all, I would recommend this book to "Almost Everyone" interested in science.

Excellant book, ties the atom to physics, chemistry, life and astronomy. Simplifies science.

I checked this book out of the library, and soon gave up on it. Gibbin has exibited a good, easy to read writing style in putting out a slew of science books. He should maybe slow down a bit. A book of this sort cries out for supporting illustrations, but has none. What it does have is a number of careless errors in the few early pages I read: He erronously refers to atomic weight, in a context where atomic number would be correct. He says e/m for electrons was found to be about one thousandth as big as that for protons, when he should have said about one thousand times as big. And so on.

John Gribbin is an excellent author and this book reflects his skill in writing. A better book that sums up everything in science and that I also recommend is THE BIBLE ACCORDING TO EINSTEIN