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- Verified Buyer
I just finished reading, this week, “The Universe Within” (2013) by Dr. Neil Shubin, a noted paleontologist and Associate Dean of Biological Sciences at the prestigious University of Chicago. This is a very informative book, extremely broad in scope, which explains in non-technical language the origin of the Universe, the Solar System, the Earth, life, and the inner workings of the human body, in scientific detail. Reading it was like watching “Cosmos” (the acclaimed TV series explaining the scientific workings of the Universe) with a different spin.I learned a lot from this book and wish that it had been written earlier and I had it available to use as a source in my college courses on Geography and early Ancient History (which I began with an account of “Natural History”, the period when life existed on earth before the advent of human beings). Speaking of history, this book (like “Cosmos”) repeatedly explains the story of the men and women who made major scientific discoveries and, a times, tells of the academic disputes that raged, in the past century, over these discoveries (which often upset long held ideas and beliefs about the natural history of the Earth and the origin of the Universe).What did I learn from this book? I will tell you only a few things, since my space is limited. 1) The distance of the stars from the earth (measured in light years) can be scientifically measured by the quality of the light they emit. 2) Those stars which are furthest out, in distant galaxies, are billions of light years away, showing that the Universe is billions of years old. 3) The stars emit red shifted light which shows that they are moving away, further and further out into space. 4) Projecting their movement back into time, all their “stuff” can be seen as emerging from a single point in space, where it emerged in one “Big Bang”.5) This “stuff” initially included only that of three light atoms, Helium, Hydrogen, and Lithium, which formed the earliest components of the earliest stars. 6) The stars, over time, fused these light atoms into heavier ones, including Oxygen, Carbon, and Iron. (All atoms heavier than Helium were originally formed by nuclear fusion in the stars.) 7) Amazingly, when a star has become “heavy” enough to form iron, in its core, it becomes unstable and eventually explodes (in a super nova, usually) 8) Such explosions spread ‘clouds” of matter (including many elements) throughout the galaxy, where the star is located. 9) The lighter of these elements fuse into new stars. The heavier elements remain as clouds around the new star.10) These clouds of heavier elements often coalesce (as they did in our Solar System) into planets. 11) Our planet was formed with an iron core, with oxygen and carbon in its surface and atmosphere. 12) The Carbon and Oxygen of the earth eventually became a major part of the life that evolved on earth, including that of human beings, 13) Given all this, we and all other living beings on earth are made (as Carl Sagan famously said) of “star stuff”. (Again, science indicates that all elements, including those inside us, were originally created inside of stars, through the process of fusion.) These facts only scratch the surface of the wealth of scientific information which this wonderful book explains.
