REALITY FRAME: Relativity and Our Place In The Universe

The acclaimed science writer builds up reality piece by piece from space to time to matter, movement, the fundamental forces, life, and the massive transformation that life itself has wrought on the natural world. He reveals that underlying it all is not as we might believe a system of immovable absolutes, but the ever-shifting, amorphous world of relativity. From religion to philosophy, humanity has traditionally sought out absolutes to explain the world around us, but as science has developed, relativity has swept away many of these uncertainties leaving only a handful of unchangeable essentials such as absolute zero, nothingness, light - leading to better science and a new understanding of the essence of being human. Chapters cover Space, Stuff, Time, Motion, Gravitation, Life, Creativity and Innovation and Fundamental Relations and an appendix is a brilliant Special Theory of Relativity for Beginners. Relativity explains how much damage will be caused by a car crash, how we can travel through time, and how gravity does its job. The concept of a frame of reference is going to be the central theme in uncovering relativity's role. Then we must bring in human creativity, the relativity of understanding and ideas as highlighted by a famous TV show in the 70s, Jacob Bronowski's The Ascent of Man. Bronowski recognised that it was impossible to separate a history of science from the development of human culture and it has shaped and transformed that culture and is intertwined with the effective development of an understanding of the place of humanity in the Universe. But before everything we must get to grips with the unnervingly slippery topic of empty space. 310pp.