John O. (buzzby) - , reviewed on 2/19/2007 + 6062 more book reviews

Helpful Score: 2

Wonderful book, written in "layman's terms", which means there's more biographies of 19th century scientists than I like, but he does manage to put in a lot of science, and also give a lot of the sense of uncertainty in the scientific evidence. Lots of good etymological (word origin) information (for instance, I now know where the phrase "cloud nine" came from [hint, there's probably a "cloud eight" and a "cloud ten"]). There's a lot of "if the earth was the size of a grain of sand, then theres...." and "if the time that humans were on earth was 1 second, then the trilobites...."

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