Product Description: Theories for Everything highlights the rich, compelling stories behind science's greatest discoveries and the minds and methods that made them possible. Authoritative, entertaining, and easy to follow, it provides indispensable information on our current theories about the natural and physical world as well as a concise overview of how those ideas evolved.
Filled with illustrations, topical essays, and sidebars, these fascinating pages cover every major topic imaginable—astronomy, the human body and its inner workings, the nature of matter and energy, genetics and evolution, and the complex relationship between mind and behavior. Broken down by subject, the book provides readers with a thorough examination of each set of related theories as they are tested and refined and introduces all the major figures in the history of science, including Aristotle, Archimedes, Copernicus, Galileo, Descartes, Pascal, Newton, Edison, Pasteur, Darwin, Pavlov, Curie, Einstein, Freud, Feynman, and Hawking. The lives of more than 45 scientists are captured in special time lines that add depth and detail to the running narrative.
Each discovery is presented as a detective story: the narrative focuses on how inquisitive investigators posit, revise, and improve upon their descriptions of nature. And like any first-rate mystery, it entices its readers, inviting them to match wits with the scientific sleuths whose theories for everything have unraveled nature's riddles and reshaped how we see our world.
Excellent, Educational Book ^ Please disregard the ludicrous ravings of this book's first reviewer, who judges the entire tome on the basis, not of its cover, but of a single sidebar. He inexplicably dismisses the eminently-qualified authors, who have been senior editors of such publications as Discover, Natural History, and Astronomy, and who I can assure you were thoroughly vetted by National Geographic.
"Theories for Everything" is a beautifully illustrated and well-written introduction to the history of science, particularly useful to young people but also to adults who would like a general refresher. Divided into six chapters -- The Heavens, The Human Body, Matter and Energy, Life Itself, Earth and Moon, Mind and Behavior -- it is neither exhaustive nor highly academic, but it is fun and lively, full of timelines and mini-biographies of science luminaries, which should encourage further exploration.
Too Much Garbage ^ I bought this book largely because it is published by National Geographic. Big mistake. Just turn to page 216 and read the article entitled "Quantum Mechanics". It is pure garbage.
The authors say that knowledge of a quantum particle's position and velocity is limited by measurement limitations. While that may be true, it is far more accurate and interesting to say, as Mr. Heisenberg did, that this uncertainty is an immutable property of the universe, without regard to measurement methods.
But what follows in that same article is truly most baffling. The authors describe quantum mechanical "tunneling" in terms of light that pass through bricks and of blind fleas that may or may not be trapped in a mesh. I think they are talking about a very theoretical and unsubstantiated hypothesis of wormhole time machines. The saddest part is that there are many examples of verified strange and interesting quantum characteristics that the authors fail to address.
Other errors also abound. For example, pages 164 and 167 depict and describe the Archimedean screw as "a spiral-shaped pipe" which is utterly false.
Also check the authors' science degrees. None are listed.
Anything Goes Trivia
Megaton Man
Trevor
