You Are Here - by Christopher Potter (Paperback)

About the Book

You Are Here is not just physics for poets, but as close to poetry or music as science is ever likely to get. Christopher Potter s narrative is as imaginative, ingenious, and elegantly concise as it is user-friendly. Sylvia Nasar, author of A Beautiful Mind

A personal, brilliant, and often amusing account . . . . An idiosyncratic, encyclopedic blitzkrieg of a book. The Boston Globe

The Verdict: Read. Time

Christopher Potter s You Are Here is a lively and accessible biography of the universe how it fits together and how we fit into it in the style of science writers like Richard Dawkins, Bill Bryson, and Richard Feynman, as seen through the lens of today s most cutting-edge scientific thinking. "

Book Synopsis

"You Are Here is not just physics for poets, but as close to poetry or music as science is ever likely to get. Christopher Potter's narrative is as imaginative, ingenious, and elegantly concise as it is user-friendly." -- Sylvia Nasar, author of A Beautiful Mind

"A personal, brilliant, and often amusing account . . . . An idiosyncratic, encyclopedic blitzkrieg of a book." --The Boston Globe

"The Verdict: Read." -- Time

Christopher Potter's You Are Here is a lively and accessible biography of the universe--how it fits together and how we fit into it--in the style of science writers like Richard Dawkins, Bill Bryson, and Richard Feynman, as seen through the lens of today's most cutting-edge scientific thinking.

From the Back Cover

You Are Here is a dazzling exploration of the universe and our relationship to it, as seen through the lens of today's most cutting-edge scientific thinking. Here, for the first time in a single span, is the life of the universe, from quarks to galaxy superclusters and from slime to Homo sapiens. Christopher Potter brilliantly tells the story of how something evolved from nothing and how something became everything; how the universe was once a moment of perfect symmetry and is now 13.7 billion years of history. With wisdom and wonder, Potter traverses the cosmos from its conception to its eventual end--while exploring everything in between.

Review Quotes

"You Are Here will provide an antidote to existential vertigo, helping you find your feet in a limitless universe." - Matt Ridley
"Christopher Potter's new book sweeps across both space and time in an ambitious attempt to show what science has revealed about our place in the cosmos in a way that is accessible and yet doesn't skimp on the science. . . . Potter's crisp, authoritative writing and his deft handling of difficult subjects makes this a book worth reading. . . . Potter is in command of his subject--especially when he guides us through the philosophical underpinnings of science itself. Anyone drawn to 'the big questions' will enjoy this latest synthesis." - New Scientist
"Reading You Are Here is like taking a guided tour of the universe with a private car and driver. Potter discourses with ease while all the grand theories and grand thinkers--relativity, evolution, quantum field theory, string theory, Pythagoras, Galileo, Einstein--flash by the window. . . . Giving us in the course of a few hours' time quite an advanced education in certainties and their opposite." - The Boston Globe
"Evocative. . . . Quarks, squarks, and 'vibrating lengths of pure energy' are elegantly expounded. . . . Most compellingly, Potter examines the provisional nature of scientific inquiry, in which conjecture can lead to insight and a weakness of a hypothesis can become a strength." - The New Yorker
"Compelling. . . . Potter's writing is crisp and authoritative. . . . He does an admirable job, making centuries-old questions seem fresh, even urgent. Where most authors take a historical approach (here's what we discovered when), Potter organizes the text by scale--here are things that are our size; here are things that are really big; here are things that are really small--along with a brief history of the universe, from the big bang to the present. . . . He is at his best when he steps back and examines the 'big picture, ' exploring the philosophical implications of what the scientists have found, particularly in the final chapters." - The Globe and Mail