Infinity in the Palm of Your Hand: Fifty Wonders That Reveal an Extraordinary Universe

by Marcus Chown

Overview

A mind-bending journey through some of the most weird and wonderful facts about our universe, vividly illuminating the hidden truths that govern our everyday lives.





"The tone is consistently light and breezy...an addictive, intriguing, and entertaining read...a handy guide for anyone yearning to spice up their conversational skills." — Booklist





Fact: You could fit the whole human race in the volume of a sugar cube.


Fact: The electrical energy in a single mosquito is enough to cause a global mass extinction.


Fact: You age more quickly on the top floor than on the ground floor.





So much of our world seems to make perfect sense, and scientific breakthroughs have helped us understand ourselves, our planet, and our place in the universe in fascinating detail. But our adventures in space, our deepening understanding of the quantum world, and our leaps in technology have also revealed a universe far stranger than we ever imagined.





With brilliant clarity and wit, bestselling author Marcus Chown examines the profound science behind fifty remarkable scientific facts that help explain the vast complexities of our existence.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781635765946
Publisher:	Diversion Books
Publication date:	04/23/2019
Pages:	224
Sales rank:	637,027
Product dimensions:	5.40(w) x 8.40(h) x 0.80(d)

About the Author

Marcus Chown is an award-winning writer and broadcaster. Formerly a radio astronomer at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, he is cosmology consultant of New Scientist. His books include The Ascent of Gravity (named the Sunday Times' 2017 Science Book of the Year), What A Wonderful World, Quantum Theory Cannot Hurt You, and We Need to Talk About Kelvin (shortlisted for the 2010 Royal Society Book Prize). Marcus has also tried his hand at apps and won the Bookseller Digital Innovation of the Year award for Solar System for iPad.

Table of Contents

Foreword 1

Part 1 Biological Things

1 The Common Thread 7

2 Catch Me if You Can 10

3 The Oxygen Trick 13

4 Seven-year Itch 18

5 Living With the Alien 21

6 The Dispensable Brain 24

Part 2 Human Things

7 Interaction, Interaction, Interaction 31

8 The Grandmother Advantage 34

9 Lost Tribe 38

10 Missed Opportunity 41

Part 3 Terrestial Things

11 The Alphabet of Nature 47

12 Rock Sponge 50

13 Deep Impact 52

14 Secret of Sunlight 55

Part 4 Solar System Things

15 Celebrating Mass 61

16 Killer Sun 65

17 Light of Other Days 69

18 A Brief History of Falling 72

19 The Planet That Stalked the Earth 75

20 Please Squeeze Me 79

21 Hex Appeal 82

22 Map of the Invisible 84

23 Lord of the Rings 87

24 Stargate Moon 91

Part 5 Fundamental Things

25 Infinity in the Palm of Your Hand 97

26 Bungalow Benefits 101

27 The Incredible Exploding Mosquito 105

28 The Unknowable 108

29 Double Trouble 113

30 Loopy Liquid 119

31 Unbreak My Heart 122

32 Who Ordered That? 126

33 A Wonderful Thing Is a Piece of String 130

34 No Time Like the Present 133

35 How to Build a Time Machine 136

Part 6 Extraterrestial Things

36 Ocean Worlds 143

37 Alien Garbage 147

38 Interplanetary Stowaways 151

39 Stardust Made Flesh 154

40 The Fragile Blue Dot 157

Part 7 Cosmic Things

41 The Day Without a Yesterday 161

42 Ghost Cosmos 165

43 Heart of Darkness 168

44 Afterglow of Creation 171

45 Masters of the Universe 175

46 Flipping Gravity 180

47 The Voice of Space 183

48 Pocket Universe 187

49 Credit Card Cosmos 190

50 The Universe Next Door 194

Notes 199

Acknowledgments 213

About the Author 214

Editorial Reviews

"Prolific science writer Chown (The Ascent of Gravity, 2017) explains in the foreword to this book that he's always looking for fun facts to liven up book readings and entertain strangers at cocktail parties. With that end in mind, he presents 50 seemingly dubious scientific proclamations, or, as he dubs them, 'things'— Human Things, Solar System Things, Extraterrestrial Things, and so on—intended to dazzle audiences. Each declaration ('Human beings are one-third mushroom'; 'You age faster on the top floor of a building than on the ground floor') gets its own two or three-page entry, consisting of the claim, a supporting quote from luminaries ranging from Albert Einstein to Walt Whitman to Pink Floyd, and an accessible presentation of Chown's scientific reasoning. The tone is consistently light and breezy, even when the science, which is backed up by chapter notes, gets a little technical. The end result is an addictive, intriguing, and entertaining read, plus, as a bonus, a handy guide for anyone yearning to spice up their conversational skills." — Booklist





A genial tour of the universe and its mysteries.
According to Einsteinian and other theories of relativity, light should take about 8.5 minutes to zoom from the sun to Earth. Yet, as New Scientist cosmology consultant Chown (The Ascent of Gravity: The Quest to Understand the Force that Explains Everything, 2017, etc.) notes, it takes much longer—30,000 years, in fact. The delay has to do with the density of the sun and the circuitous route that light must take in order to leave: “Photons are like Christmas shoppers fighting their way down a crowded street,” writes the author. “They cannot go in a straight line but are forced to zigzag.” In the case of light from the sun, it can advance no more than a centimeter before pinging elsewhere, and before you know it—well, as Chown notes, the light now bathing us was born during the last Ice Age. The author writes with gods-for-clods, rocks-for-jocks enthusiasm: “Some slime molds have thirteen sexes. (And you think you have difficulty finding and keeping a partner!).” Though the rhetorical ploy gets old, there’s plenty for more advanced students to ponder, such as Chown’s passing note that all life is really cellular life. Indeed, there are lots of moments that will stir the imaginations of meditative stoners. For example, the air we breathe was also very likely breathed by Marilyn Monroe, Julius Caesar, and “the last Tyrannosaurus Rex ever to have stalked the earth.” Also, the laws of probability suggest that the number of possible earths and their possible inhabitants are uncountably unknowable: “There are an infinite number of galaxies that look just like our own galaxy containing an infinite number of versions of you, whose lives, up until this moment, have been absolutely identical to yours.”
Heavy stuff lightly spun—just the thing for the science buff in the house. — Kirkus Review





"[Chown is] a science popularizer in the [Carl] Sagan mold…The reason Infinity in the Palm of Your Hand works so well is that it does not ‘dumb down’ abstruse science: instead, it shows how utterly wonderful and wonder-filled scientific discoveries are, even when (especially when) applied to mundane life and things we generally accept without thinking much about them. There is something exhilarating in Chown’s writing, something captivating in the way he casually tosses about a variety of fascinating facts and discoveries while explaining how many things remain unknown and perhaps, given the inherent limitations of the human mind, unknowable (although don’t bet on it).”—InfoDad blog





"This book describes fifty wondrous phenomena of the Universe. Topics range from the indivisibly small to the unknowably vast. No chapter exceeds a half-dozen pages, and readers will never feel bogged down in convoluted or technical language…This popular-science overview of the Universe is perfect for lay readers with inquiring minds.”—Internet Review of Books

From the Publisher

2019-02-17

A genial tour of the universe and its mysteries.

According to Einsteinian and other theories of relativity, light should take about 8.5 minutes to zoom from the sun to Earth. Yet, as New Scientist cosmology consultant Chown (The Ascent of Gravity: The Quest to Understand the Force that Explains Everything, 2017, etc.) notes, it takes much longer—30,000 years, in fact. The delay has to do with the density of the sun and the circuitous route that light must take in order to leave: "Photons are like Christmas shoppers fighting their way down a crowded street," writes the author. "They cannot go in a straight line but are forced to zigzag." In the case of light from the sun, it can advance no more than a centimeter before pinging elsewhere, and before you know it—well, as Chown notes, the light now bathing us was born during the last Ice Age. The author writes with gods-for-clods, rocks-for-jocks enthusiasm: "Some slime molds have thirteen sexes. (And you think you have difficulty finding and keeping a partner!)." Though the rhetorical ploy gets old, there's plenty for more advanced students to ponder, such as Chown's passing note that all life is really cellular life. Indeed, there are lots of moments that will stir the imaginations of meditative stoners. For example, the air we breathe was also very likely breathed by Marilyn Monroe, Julius Caesar, and "the last Tyrannosaurus Rex ever to have stalked the earth." Also, the laws of probability suggest that the number of possible earths and their possible inhabitants are uncountably unknowable: "There are an infinite number of galaxies that look just like our own galaxy containing an infinite number of versions of you, whose lives, up until this moment, have been absolutely identical to yours."

Heavy stuff lightly spun—just the thing for the science buff in the house.

Kirkus Reviews