Atom: A Single Oxygen Atom's Odyssey from the Big Bang to Life on Earth... and Beyond Book

The history of the cosmos might seem an impossibly big subject for a single book. But in Atom: an Odyssey from the Big Bang to Life on Earth...and Beyond, bestselling American science-writer Lawrence M. Krauss manages to do just that. By centering his story around the long life of a single atom of oxygen located in a drop of water, Krauss expertly guides us from the beginning to the end of the cosmos. Not so long ago the words "As it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be, world without end..." were accepted as a God-given truth, describing the world that we experience. But no longer, as Krauss reminds us, modern science predicts that there will be an end to our little patch in the cosmos: "eventually...after a host of civilisations have come and gone, one day a single proton in our oxygen atom will go poof. Then perhaps a billion billion billion years later, the second proton will die. The process will continue until our atom, and all atoms in the universe, are no longer. The lives of our atoms will have finally ended." However, as Krauss puts it "a lot can happen before the galactic fuel gauge reads Empty," our oxygen atom will have had a very long, eventful and very interesting life. On the way it gets caught up in the origin of the Earth, its life and ourselves, it is a fascinating story told by a very literate scientist. Lawrence M Krauss is a professor of physics at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland and knows what he is writing about. He has also written five other books about physics and the universe and knows how to put across difficult concepts and the mindboggling problems of scale in the universe (all those -illions). Whenever possible he reminds us of commonly observable features which allow the general reader to glimpse the awesome nature of the atom. With index and a general guide to further reading, an ideal introduction for the general reader. --Douglas PalmerRead More