Customer Reviews

You Are Here: A Portable History of the Universe

5 star:		(14)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

Four and a half ADVENTUROUS Stars!! Author Christopher Potter takes us on a short journey across 14 Billion years of time & space using hard science & speculation, unassailable facts & philosophy, while attempting to generally collate a huge amount of up-to-date data into palatable information for the layman. For the most part, he is very successful. This is an intensive and extensive look at our universe and our place in it: "You Are Here". Oddly enough, this book seems to stand on more solid ground than highly technical books because the author is not a scientist and he's explaining things in understandable language from a standpoint of known scientific findings as a 'summary presentation', often viewed through the prisms of philosophy and reason. This voyage takes us from the edge of the universe, which "is not contained in anything" to manmade and natural physical realities (the awesome chapter called "26 degrees of Separation"), to the birth of life and man on earth ("In and Out of Africa"), and beyond. The solar system, the galaxy, billions of galaxies, galactic clusters, super clusters, the Sloan Great Wall, quasars, black holes and more are taken on in plain, but awe-inspiring language. And there are many fascinating earthly & solar system diversions along the way. The book is laden with meaningful quotes, scientific references, previously unknown facts, and amazement at the reality of life and scientific achievements. Instead of being like a dry college lecture in an auditorium, it's more like a wide-ranging after-dinner discussion with a very well-educated friend. Does he gloss over some things? Yes, sometimes dwelling in trivial detail and repetition, but we also become aware of new things such as the existence of the black hole Sagittarius A and the incredible Sloan Great Wall. So "You Are Here"...on planet Earth...of our 8 (yes, eight) planet solar system...of the bending, spiraling Orion Arm...of the Milky Way galaxy...of The Local Group...of the Virgo Supercluster...etc., etc... Indeed! A very enjoyable read about our life on this earth and in the universe, and the life of the universe about us and it is Highly Recommended! Four and a half VOYAGING Stars!!
(This review is based on a Kindle download.)

This is an amazingly ambitious book, presuming as it does to take us from the very smallest thing imaginable (the Planck limit) to the very largest (the extent of the cosmos), from the very earliest time (the Big Bang) to the heat death of the universe.

But this is not just about the physical sciences. Potter goes deeply into philosophy and biology as well. In a sense he is doing what I have done all my life, that is to look at all aspects of our existence and knowledge in an attempt to understand who I am, why I am here, and where I am going. I think Potter, who is something of social critic as well as a scientific generalist and journalist, does an admirable job. I have read other books that attempt something like this. Potter's is one of the most readable.

Potter begins with an "Orientation." We are here--at this point in time, at this place in the universe, at this stage of awareness. He follows this with Chapter 2: "26 Degrees of Separation," which is the number of degrees of mathematical magnitude in meters we are from the size of the universe (10 to the 26th). Potter gives a plethora of numerical information about things of various sizes, from the size of humans (John Keats was 1.54 meters tall, 5' 0.75 ''; the tallest people are found in Herzogovina and Montenegro where the average height of a male is 1.86 meters) through the distance to the Kuiper Belt (about 7.5 billion kilometers distance) to ultimately the radius of the visible universe (about 13 light years distance).

Next comes Chapter 3, which is about measurements and measuring, which is part of the essence of science; and then comes some ancient philosophy in Chapter 4, "It's Not About You," followed by some classical mechanics in Chapter 5, "Going through the Motions," and so on (you get the idea). In later chapters he explores biology and the very small, ending with musings on what our place in the scheme of things it and what it all means. (I love stuff like this.) Potter writes:

"WE are--everything is--woven out of the primordial hydrogen that filled the universe around 14 billion years ago. Nor need we rest there. WE are--everything is--evolved symmetrical radiation. And before that, WE are something that is beyond whatever before can mean. I am here. You are there. We are everything and everywhere. They are us." (p. 273)

His is a sort of idealistic view that I find somewhat irresistible. I like to say that on the ether wind or thereabouts, somewhere beyond the extent of our instruments and our imaginations there exists in a form not clear to us the information that is you and I and everything that has ever been or will be. (I also believe that life is a cosmic joke and death is nothing to fear.)

Some observations: "Leibniz took the view that time and space do not have a fundamental existence but are merely the means to describe the relationship between things." (p. 50). I believe that Einstein took a similar position. My sense is that time and space (spacetime) do not exist without matter/energy.

Potter writes, "Mars has no atmosphere because its magnetic field is too weak." (p. 204) Actually Mars has a rather thin atmosphere, enough though to produce winds storms that could affect NASA gear.

Here's something that I gave a "huh?" or a "wtf?" to: "Artificial selection could...be used as an argument against natural selection. In artificial selection mankind gets to choose what lives and what does not, which is no different from the kind of intervention that some all-powerful god might make." (p. 218)

Actually "mankind" (better is "humankind") does not do the choosing all by his lonesome. The animals being selected are using their wiles to be artificially selected and indeed human preferences are determined by natural selection.

There are other places in the text where Potter expresses views that have raised the eyebrows of readers other than myself. But in a book of this sort in which one of the ideas is to speculate a lot about things far and wide, I think this is okay.

Talking about the permutations (or is it combinations?) of DNA, Potter notes that there are 2 to the two thousandth ways that humans can be differently expressed. (p. 223) (That many possible humans!) He also notes that this number is the biggest in the book easily dwarfing such numbers as the number of atoms in the universe or the number of unique neuronal pathways in the brain.

"...[W]hen we know how life emerges from the inanimate, the organic and inorganic worlds will have become a continuous spectrum. Life will be an artificial distinction we make from the inanimate." (p. 232) Nice.

"Some bacteria have been found in rocks 1,000 metres underground slowly digesting organic material without the aid of oxygen and dividing only once every thousand years or so..." (p. 233) Every thousand years or so--amazing!

Despite some errors and some unlikely ideas, this is a most interesting and entertaining book.

(Note: The following books by Dennis Littrell are now available at Amazon.com:

Yoga: Sacred and Profane (Beyond Hatha Yoga)
Dennis Littrell's True Crime Companion
Novels and other Fictions
Cut to the Chaise Lounge or I Can't Believe I Swallowed the Remote!
The Holon
Teddy and Teri
High School from Hell
Let's Play Overkill!
Like a Tsunami Headed for Hilo
Understanding Evolution and Ourselves


Coming soon:

The World Is Not as We Think It Is)

I am thoroughly enjoying reading this book, and finding it hard to put it down once I pick it up. Potter takes us on a journey starting from 1 meter out to the solar system, the galaxy and the universe.

I did come across one error in the book which I thought should be mentioned. On page 39 (hardcover edition) Potter states that the Andromeda Galaxy is twice the size of the Milky Way, when in fact, even though Andromeda has many more stars, the two are considered to be about the same size and mass. See the Andromeda Galaxy article on Wikipedia.

I'm editing this review to add another factual error I found: on page 109 Potter states that J.J. Thompson measured the charge of an individual electron. Thompson in fact measured the charge-to-mass ratio of the electron (after discovering it). It was Millikan who measured the charge of the electron.

So, now I'm wondering how much I can trust the facts in this book which are new to me.

This is an exceptional book. I found it both scientifically informative and challenging both to my point of view and my thinking about philosophy. The auther is literate and very well infomed and makes some challenging concepts very clear. He takes on some of the more mind bending pieces of physics and makes them accessible, while drawing one into the insights that modern science has made. I am delighted to have read it.

The poet Robert Graves once began a book with the words, "there is one story, and one story only, that is worth your telling." The story of the beginning and development of our universe is such a tale, and is told fluently and even reverently by this author.

The very fact that Christopher Potter is not himself a scientist or mathematician only underscores that the nutshell cosmology he offers has become a TALE, just as the opening chapters of Genesis are another kind of tale to a similar purpose.

One of the most interesting themes that emerges from Potter's book is the extent to which we cross out of the intuitive. He explains again and again that analogies will get us nowhere. That childlike comparisons with the familiar are more distortion than clarification. He even warns at times that to exert one's self too avidly to visualize some of the abstruse aspects of the quantum universe can hazard madness.

Didn't some wag say that the universe is not only stranger than we imagine, but is "stranger than we are capable of imagining?" Such an observation really fits here, for the quantum origins of the universe -- set about by Planck space and Planck time -- are of a weirdness almost beyond description.

Potter does not come up with much new in this book, despite suggestions to the contrary by other reviewers. Rather, he takes a large patchwork canvas of myriad scientific popularizations and homogenizes it into a smooth, lucid narrative. He adds a dash of personal observation from time to time, and a little humor.

This book is just a very good effort to tell "the one story only that is worth your telling," the same story set down in the opening chapters of Genesis. It is science crossing over into our own peculiar 21st Century myth. A myth is a story that explains our origins.

I enjoyed the book, and purchased my own copy when I decided that I would like to keep it permanently in my library. Hope you enjoy it too.

I thoroughly enjoyed the book. I'm not a prolific reader so I appreciated the small size. It's a nice balance of science, history, theory. It puts our lives in perspective from the smallest particles to the whole universe. It only briefly discusses major science topics such as quantum physics and evolution, but I found it to be an enjoyable introduction. It made me want to read more detail about each topic, so I think the book was a success.

You Are Here: A Portable History of the Universe is a thoughtful exploration of our being in relationship to an unimaginably monumental universe which, according to most scientists at this point in historic time, seems to have come from one single flash, a birth of creative energy known as the Big Bang. In an extremely easy-to-read fashion, Christopher Potter's book deals with countless complicated concepts so that any interested person can glimpse the paradoxes facing modern science.

Beginning with a grasp of the age of the universe -- 13.7 billion years since the Big Bang -- You Are Here examines its immense size. Potter asks what is beyond the edge of this expanding mass of planets and stars and distant galaxies. Is it nothingness, if such a state is even possible? Is it empty space? Is it more star clusters just too distant for their light to reach planet earth? Or is it something more mystical? This cannot help but bring to mind the crystalline spheres deigned by ancient Greek scientist-philosophers to hold the stars.

And from whence cometh this conglomeration of stuff we name the "universe?" Common sense proclaims it could not have erupted from nothingness, yet scientific theory claims that is quite possible. Are we to set aside common sense and tag along with scientific theory with its astutely refined mathematics? Something seems contradictory with this picture yet most people go about their daily lives ignoring any rationalization about it.

You Are Here addresses the critical conditions necessary for our tiny earth to solidify from this vast void of particles, atoms, molecules, gases, substances. There were so many critical events that had to happen at just the right moment in time so "stuff" would coalesce into our one small planet that it seems downright impossible. But happen it did--and we are here.

And what about our existence? Is the very essence of humanness to be found preexisting in the primordial nothingness before the Big Bang? If it was, then whatever brought about the spark of life and a life of the mind also existed back then. You Are Here ponders whether that living energy actually started on our earth, or whether it somehow traveled here from outer space as part of the Big Bang's ongoing evolutionary expansion. In either case, there could be any number of far distant stars with solar systems similar to our sun's. The conclusion: These systems would almost certainly contain earthlike planets where eventually the spiral helix of life could form.

I would highly recommend You Are Here as an extremely fascinating, easy-to-read book containing explanations of some of the most difficult scientific concepts in terms that are clear, concise, and understandable. You will not be disappointed. By far, it is one of the best books I've read that encapsulates human existence against a scientific background, yet acknowledges the "prescientific" wisdom of the ancients who looked out at the heavens with a combination of pure reasoning and mysticism.

Is there a time -- is there a place for us under the heavens? You Are Here would suggest, yes. But maybe the most we can say of "being" is that we are warmed by a sun either by accident or decree, but we are here riding atop the third planet from the sun. As Michael Polanyi in his book Personal Knowledge points out: "We are here precisely because we have a hint, a foreknowledge, that answers are out there and with our intellects, we crave to seek them out!"

Other interesting reads:
Before the Big Bang: The Prehistory of Our Universe
Evolution: How We and All Living Things Came to Be

I was sent this book by a 'sciencey' friend who assured me I would enjoy it. To be honest I was skeptical, since hard as I try most science books go over my head. But this one is different. Out of deference to my friend I started YOU ARE HERE and then found I was hooked and eager to read on. Christopher Potter writes with a beautiful lucid style and is very erudite but what I liked most was his open-minded approach and his willingness to challenge materialism. His examples are illuminating and often witty. I would recommend this book unreservedly to all who have an interest in science but are flummoxed by most contemporary science books (which claim to be comprehensible but in fact are not). It would also make a great TV series.

One sign of a really special book is this: as I approach the end of it, I begin to realize that it is so full of valuable knowledge and wisdom that I must read it again. In this work the range of subjects covered, the quality of the writing, the sense of both expert intelligence and youthful wonder is all pretty breathtaking. In this short book, Potter sets out to cover the current state of human knowledge of the universe. He goes over everything from the most minute particles to the grandest theories of the multiverse. He provides facts, lets us in on debates, traces the histories of key developments, and points out where there still is work to be done. The pace is quick, and the author the author never allows things to become too academic for the average reader and yet does not insult our intelligence by dumbing things down too much. It would be doing a disservice to begin pointing out some of the things covered here - it would be better to pick up the book.

We are long past the days of Leonardo and science is of course a collection of highly specialized fields, each with their own vocabulary and concepts. This book is written primarily for the reasonably well-educated lay reader who would like to learn some more about what is known about the universe we live in. It was just the book that I had been looking for - only now I feel like I have to read it again.

I am "into" cosmology. This book is a wonderful story of perspective from things really vast, like the universe, to things really small, like sub atomic particles. It ties in so many areas of the sciences from chemistry to biology and mathematics and then relates them to us....the earthlings. And so many questions. Are we unique? Are we guilty of using us as the paradigm for everything "out there" and so forth. Some have said this book is hard to read and some say it is boring. I disagree with both views. The author has undertaking a massive review of everything that exists and managed to cram it into a very short book. Cudos.