Christopher Potter

“The Guide says there is an art to flying", said Ford, "or rather a knack. The knack lies in learning how to throw yourself at the ground and miss.” ― Douglas Adams, Life, the Universe and Everything

For millennia man wished he could fly like the birds, people had been up in hot air balloons since 1783, but it wasn't until 1904 with the first powered flight from the Wright Brothers that we saw the dawn of a new era. These early pioneers of the air began to fly around America, Charles Lindbergh became the first to fly from America to Paris in his epic flight and flight changed the way we connected with others around the world. But people still wanted to reach for the stars.

It would take a World War for humanity to develop the technology that would make this possible though and it was the losing side that gave the rest of the world the rockets that would enable men to finally leave the grip of gravity for the first time. That brilliant scientist was Wernher Von Braun, a former Nazi, who spent the billions of dollars that the US government wanted to spend in the Cold War space race. This space race put men in orbit, gave us technologies that we are using today and 65 years later after the first powered flight, put the first men on the moon.

Two pictures from the Apollo missions Earthrise, taken during the first manned mission, and The Blue Marble, taken in the final one, became some of the most reproduced and influential photos of all time. It became the image that inspired the environmental movements around the world as people realised that this small blue planet was our home and that getting more than half a dozen people off at any one time was near impossible. We only have this planet. If we bugger it up, who knows what could happen

This is an enjoyable book on the rise of man to overcome gravity, rise from the surface of the earth and achieve the monumental task to stand on the surface of our nearest satellite. Good overview of the history of flight and the links that those first pilots had to the rocket men.… (plus d'informations)

I think this book lacked focus. All the descriptions of the book talk about how the 24 astronauts who left earth orbit to travel around the moon came back changed by the experience. You do get some of that, but the majority of the book is about the origin of spaceflight, from Goddard through Apollo. You get a lot of Lindbergh and Von Braun, and quite a bit on the atheist Madalyn Murray O'Hair, who sued over the Apollo 8 Genesis reading.

There are historical errors throughout. The Bumper missiles were never known as Hermes II. That was an entirely different missile. And there was no astronaut named Ed Cernan.

The author makes a point to say that he doesn't use the terms astronauts and cosmonauts to differentiate which nation launches a person into space. He considers them all astronauts. Yet throughout the book, he refers to Soviet/Russian cosmonauts as cosmonauts, and American astronauts as astronauts. I don't get it. There were also typographical errors scattered throughout the text.

I feel there was very little here that hasn't been covered in other books on spaceflight.… (plus d'informations)

A lucid, readable explanation of the physics of the universe. The author does a particularly good job of explaining relativity in easy to understand terms, which is a valuable service. I did find the approach of the book somewhat unedifying and, in many places, dull, as he carried out his ever increasing discussions of size and time. I think there are other ways this could have been approached which would have been more interesting and compelling. I also thought some of his ruminations on science, philosophy, and religion were a bit mushy and light-headed for someone who had written such a strongly evidence-based science book. I do agree that science needs philosophy, and vice versa, but the author makes no compelling argument as to why science needs religion; indeed, he basically just makes statements that are not supported by anything that could be called logical argumentation. He appears to just assume the reader will accept his formulations. This is not acceptable in a book dealing with topics that so require critical thinking to understand. Mysticism has pervaded way too much of physics in recent years, and would have been much better left out of this work altogether. And the quote from Jastrow in the final chapter about science climbing a peak and finding theologians have been there for centuries is laughable, particularly coming as it does at the end of a book that has provided plenty of evidence to the contrary, but doesn't seem to recognize it. In fact, every time scientists climb a peak, they find it was the Greeks, or the Egyptians, or some other early civilization that was there before, or that the peak is empty, and just now being conquered. They then yank the theologians along by the hair of their head, with them (the theologians) kicking and screaming the whole way until they finally reach the peak; then, those same theologians assume the moral high ground, and claim they were there all along, even when the historical records plainly dictate otherwise. And there will always be someone like this author perfectly willing to play their game, take them at their word, and gamely help them create new truths out of whole cloth.… (plus d'informations)

Reading You Are Here: A Portable History of the Universe by Christopher Potter will make you sexier. I know, what an outrageous claim to make, but it's true. Why? Because intelligent, smart, well-informed people are sexy. I won't lie, I struggled through You Are Here, as it is full of complex subject matter and the last time I took a physics class was in 7th grade, when we made pulleys. The last time I took an earth science class was in 10th grade, and well, I will admit I used to come in everyday, sleep, and then copy my friend's notes. Despite being head over heels in love with a geologist, I don't really understand or know much about science. You could mention the term string-theory to me and I would probably think you were talking about knitting.You Are Here made me sexier because it helped me to correct some of my ignorance about the universe and about science. I never really understood why black holes are such a big deal. I couldn't have told you what the Big Bang Theory was. But now, I feel I can tell you the basics of relativity (measuring something by using another thing in relation), that Pythagoras did not actually come up with the Pythagorean Theorem (a-squared plus b-squared = c-squared), and what a red giant is (not a character in a fantasy novel). It feels good to know these terms and ideas. I like learning about history. I like learning. I should hope we never stop learning, even after leaving the hallowed halls of school and university.This book is definitely a book you should read slowly because the theories, facts, and ideas do take some time to process. It is dense material. I mean, there was one chapter on measuring and numbers and it was so hard for me to get through because my brain doesn't process numbers as well as it does literary things. The most interesting chapter was on evolution. I took a biological anthropology class, so I have a little background in that, and well I love to say "homo heidelbergensis" (fricken cool). Again, it's interesting to know the ideas of where we come from. Potter doesn't exactly discount creationism, nor is he disrespectful towards it, so yes, this book is theology-friendly.Overall, although I struggled through this book and it took me forever, I am glad I read, if only because I can now hold a conversation with my love on his favorite subject, science. Lord knows he's put up with my prattling on books for long enough.I really liked these quotes from You Are Here:"Science is a way of translating that individual experience of the world into collective experience." -pg. 55"What launched the scientific revolution was not the placing of the sun at the center of the cosmos, so much as the removal of the earth. It's not about us."- pg. 80"In scientific discourse the poetry is in mathematics and the same lanugage judges them alike: symmetry, elegance, simplicity, brevity, subtlety, profundity are the highest qualities of both means of apprehending reality." - pg. 159"It's how the words are put together that matters, and that's definitely true of the language of life, which has a very small vocabulary and is written in few sentences." - pg. 226"As the American astronomer and physicist Robert Jastrow (1925-2008) has predicted: the scientist who has climbed the highest peak may find 'as he pulls himself over the final rock, [that:] he is greeted by a band of theologians who have been sitting there for centuries" - pg. 274… (plus d'informations)