skopia
Gamow carries a reader from counting to infinity, from atoms to the expanding universe, drawing every illustration himself. The psychologist Steven Pinker traces his science writing to reading this as a boy.
Twenty-five million people bought a physics book. Hawking explains black holes, the arrow of time, and whether the universe needed a beginning, carrying the argument on almost no mathematics at all.
Sagan moves from the Big Bang to the Library of Alexandria to the carbon in your body, forged inside dying stars. No science book written in English had ever sold so well.
Heraclitus said you cannot step into the same river twice. Parmenides said nothing changes at all. Before Socrates, Greek thinkers asked what the world is made of and answered without appeal to gods.
Everything is atoms falling through empty space, Lucretius argues in Latin verse, your soul included, and it dies when your body does. He wrote the poem to cure his readers of fearing death.