You Are Here: A Portable History of the Universe

by Christopher Potter

“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.

Genres: Science, Nonfiction, History, Physics, Philosophy, Religion, Astronomy

295 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2008

Reviews

[deilann · Rating 1 out of 5]

Originally posted on SpecFic Junkie.

That moment when you're reading a non-fiction science book and you realize the author isn't a scientist. Lemme put it this way: the first moment you make a glaring error in a non-fiction book, I'm going to start giving it more scrutiny. The second? I'm upset.

I was ranting and raving on both Goodreads and in meatspace as I read this book. Where should I start...

So, the book was okay-ish at the start, although it felt a bit like a bunch of Wikipedia pages thrown together (which makes sense, as he did most of his research on Wikipedia according to the sources at the end). Then, I started noticing something odd.

There were no citations.

Now, it's really bad when a non-fiction book, especially a non-fiction science book has no citations. One of the things I loved about The Signal and the Noise was how almost every single fact, no matter how mundane it seemed, had a citation. No footnotes at all? You're screwing up majorly.

So, I was pretty unenthused... and then on page 52 he mentions how in the Hopi language, they have no linear construct of time. This is so untrue. This was something put forward by an amateur linguist a long, long time ago and has been so heavily debunked that I can't even. And for a guy who did most of his research on Wikipedia... well, why didn't he read the wiki page on the Hopi Time Controversy?

There's the one error.

But then we get quotes like this:

"But for whatever reasons (and many reasons have been put forward) the history of science is largely a story that came to be told in the Western world."

Now, one might argue that he means the narrative of the history of science (which would be untrue, considering how much of science was uncovered in the Middle East and it's well known that European pyrotechnics were gathered from China... but no. He actually talks about how one of the reasons put forward is because the Chinese language uses ideographs and so they might be more "idea-oriented" which makes them less likely to do science.

No.

No.

No.

Many major scientific discoveries were made in the Middle East, China, and India either simultaneously with the Western world or before.

Some things aren't as bad, but still eye-roll worthy:

"The knowledge that the planetary orbits are ellipses and not circles still has the power to shock even today, so instinctively do we respond to the idea that the motion of the heavens must be circular as the ancients believed."

Please raise your hand if you're shocked by the orbits not being circular. Anyone? ...anyone?

"For hundreds of years, the Greek language had been lost to the West."

I know he means Italy, basically, but all I can think when he phrases it this way is, "...even to the Greeks?"

"Complex multi-celled organisms like flies and human beings reproduce by a process we call sex."

Is it just me, or is "all" implied in there? Because I'm pretty sure many plants and even some animals would beg to differ.

Oh, and then he talks about dinosaurs and crocodiles evolving from lizards. We're done here. We're so done.

[Jim · Rating 2 out of 5]

I swear that I wrote the bulk of this review prior to completing the book. I read most of this book while traveling and wrote my initial thoughts on a sheet of paper from a notepad printed with the name of the Mandalay Bay Resort and Casino where I was staying in Las Vegas. I state this because I wrote the part about Wikipedia before I got to the end of book where in a note at the end of the bibliography, the author states that he, in fact, frequently consulted Wikipedia as part of his research while writing the book. Perhaps that is why the book reads like several Wikipedia articles strung together.

I am somewhat biased I am afraid because I have read several book of the popular-science type and particularly ones covering the beginning of the universe and the development of life. I have read A Short History of Nearly Everything , The Science Class You Wish You Had , Coming of Age in the Milky Way , and of course, Carl Sagan's Cosmos and Stephen Hawking's A Brief History of Time . I feel that any of those authors could have written this book in just a few days using nothing but Wikipedia as a reference.

The universe is immense. The universe is old. The universe is complex. That is all. Carry on. So goes the first meaningful chapter which is a straightforward comparison of size starting at one meter and proceeding ever larger until arriving at the size of the visible universe. In similar fashion, subsequent chapters cover the history of science including the development of the scientific method and measuring devices. A chapter midway through the book mirrors the earlier chapter by starting at 100 centimeters and going down to subatomic particles. Other chapters start at the Big Bang and the birth of the universe and proceed through the development of galaxies including our own Milky Way, then the Solar System and our home planet, and then the development of life on Earth and eventually arriving at the evolution of our own species. The information presented is easily gathered from Wikipedia and is arranged in a basically straightforward manner.

I would like to think that I can appreciate a well-written popular science book. I just do not think this is an example of one.

[Jeffrey · Rating 4 out of 5]

Potter is the author of the newest attempt to boil the workings of science down to a readable and digestible small book. There seems to have been a craze of popular-science tomes about the creation and other meanings of life as of late. Potter is not the first, nor will he be the last writer to try and explain the world as science believes it to be in a book aimed at lay people. My favorite was Six Easy Pieces by Richard Feynman (I still listen to the lectures on CD from time to time, they must be a lot easier to him than me, sadly).
Potter does a fine job of explaining most things, putting the words in a sequence that I read if not always fully understand. Yet, it is his goal to whiddle the complex into the understandable, he does not always succeed, yet that might be a gap in my own scientific understanding. Still, he looks at science through the prism of materialism, meaning as best I can tell that all material things can be scientifically explained. He is not as opposed to religious thoughts as others in the science realm, but he is not the all embracer than many would like him to be either.

[Julie · Rating 3 out of 5]

What is awesome: the descriptions and examples of scale of size, so you can put the universe in perspective (yeah, I know humans aren't the center of the universe, stop repeating yourself mr potter, but that's how we experience it).

What is not awesome: I'm not any clearer on quantum physics than I was after Universe in a Nutshell or Black Holes and Time Warps. I'm not sure there's anything other than crazy genius and a life locked up in a physics lab that would make string theory and particle spin make sense. Beyond that, he didn't say anything I didn't already know about physics and biology that I didn't learn in high school (non-AP, in a public school--regular old bio and physics). The pseudo-lyrical intro is a freshman essay, trying to weave religion and science together but this is
Supposed to be a summary of scientific discovery, not a philosophical what-does-it-all-mean treatise. I stopped reading when I hit the conclusion and found it to be similar.

But despite all that, the scales of size chapters are so cool...

[April · Rating 3 out of 5]

Reading You Are Here: A Portable History of the Universe by Christopher Potter will make you sexier. I know, what an outrageous claim to make, but it's true. Why? Because intelligent, smart, well-informed people are sexy. I won't lie, I struggled through You Are Here, as it is full of complex subject matter and the last time I took a physics class was in 7th grade, when we made pulleys. The last time I took an earth science class was in 10th grade, and well, I will admit I used to come in everyday, sleep, and then copy my friend's notes. Despite being head over heels in love with a geologist, I don't really understand or know much about science. You could mention the term string-theory to me and I would probably think you were talking about knitting.
Read the rest of my review here

[Christophe · Rating 4 out of 5]

The book was very very interesting. Many questions still to be answered - more than what I️ had come to mind when I️ picked this book off the shelf. Some of the information made sense to me, sometimes it did not, but nonetheless it was fascinating to read even though most of it was beyond my knowledge and comprehension. Science and the creation of the world (and relative space on the small and large spectrum) had always amazed me ever since those space and science videos I’d watched in middle school. If you’re someone who wants to be amazed by how thrilling, confusing, and perplex the universe we live in is, read this!

[Tangzhou · Rating 3 out of 5]

中文版叫我们人类的宇宙，翻译的蛮好
叙述的方式和视角很有意思，还有很多哲学内容，但无论科普还是哲学都有点太点到为止了。
老爹送的书

[Lauren · Rating 2 out of 5]

You don't have to understand the material in every chapter to get the gist of Potter's You Are Here: The universe is overwhelmingly immense, continues to expand, and who are we (humans) to say we are of any importance? Potter constantly references this Copernican idea that man is not unique, Earth more than likely is not unique, and man is not the center of the universe or even the center of anything within the universe. He demonstrates this idea by measuring outward in meters from our individual selves to various places of interest in the universe and then later measures inward to the microscopic and subatomic. Another chapter acts as a Cliff's Notes version of the history of scientific investigation into our universe and man's (in)significance. Further chapters offer glimpses at facts and theories surrounding the beginning of the universe, the creation of stars, the geological history of Earth, and finally the evolutionary history of life on Earth. Potter ends by highlighting that science and theology/philosophy/the arts are wrongly juxtaposed, that science is actually aiding man's need to expand and be master of our domain (at whatever level of the universe you wish to define as "man's domain"), and finally trails off by wondering if at some point scientists map and define everything in the uni/multi-verse, can we define any of it with certainty given that our reality and everything in it is based on our perspective of privilege and the need for everything to have meaning and purpose in relation to ourselves.

Overall, You Are Here is a decent attempt to make science and the universe more accessible to the non-scientist. However, I wouldn't recommend it to someone looking to satisfy their curiosity concerning the universe and/or man's place in it. Several popular science books written by scientists such as Carl Sagan, Stephen Hawking, Neil Degrasse Tyson, and Lisa Randall pack tons of information while not being written solely for the scientific community and are much more enjoyable reads. Even Wikipedia, which Potter actually references as a frequently used resource at the end of his bibliography, would be as or more informative as You Are Here. In short, skip it.

[James Murphy · Rating 4 out of 5]

I've always loved books about cosmology. This is just another one, and yet I can't be so easily dismissive about it because its approach is different. Remember when you were a kid and you wrote our your full cosmic address, beginning with your name and proceeding through Solar System to Galaxy to Universe? This is much the same. Potter, however, begins at the larger scale and works toward the smaller until his book becomes like a pointing finger: you are here. And also, faithful to his subtitle, A Portable History of the Universe, he does indeed narrate how we think the universe came to be as we understand it today, from the first fractions of the first second of the Big Bang to the birth of the Milky Way and our sun and the solar system until I came at last to where I was this morning in history, watching the light from our local star fill the street outside my window. Potter's telling of all this is as interesting as any I've read. His explanations of such arcane subjects as gravity and space/time and the nature of light are clear, easy to follow. I'd mention only 2 areas of tedium. As usual when reading about quantum theory my eyes began to glaze over and my mind to wander to thoughts of Scarlett Johansson. Not Potter's fault, but mine for thrashing about in depths over my head, but I still struggled with it. Secondly, toward the end his history starts to tumble and stumble as his story necessarily picks up speed. In limiting himself to describing the course of evolution and life on earth in 2 chapters he falls into survey. As a consequence these chapters are less interesting and informative than the rest of the book. But otherwise it's useful and full of fresh insight, and Potter discusses the nature of the universe well. Mostly he does a good job explaining where we are and why.

[Sean · Rating 1 out of 5]

Reads like a school report that was mostly copied from Wikipedia.

[Tony · Rating 3 out of 5]

Some of this was beyond my grasp. The author uses our best measurements of time and distance to give an idea of the universe as we think we know it. He then moves from discussing huge distances from our planet and delves into sub-atomic particles and infinitesimally small units of measurement and the material world that exist at that level. That discussion leads to his summary of current scientific thought on how the universe might have come into existence some 13 billion years ago.
Over and over he brings up what is to him the disconcerting idea that humans, and the earth, do not enjoy a privileged status in the universe - that it's by pure chance that we're here to contemplate our own existence. But he ends on an up note, putting forth the idea that maybe, somewhere in the future, the paths of science and theology will intersect and merge.

[Mary · Rating 2 out of 5]

Much more in-depth, sciency and difficultyier than I thought. I mean, look at the words I have to make up to explain how lost I got. I think if I'd had some visual demonstrations to refer to, or even some cartoons, it might have helped make sense of the anti-spin of a quark - or whatever - but I feel good for having powered through. And if I ever have a sudden need to explain quantum physics to someone I figure is slightly more confused than I, I'll have a handy reference of words to string together to make myself look great. :D

[David Chivers · Rating 4 out of 5]

A good, clear read as to the beginings and size of the universe. Fascinating! The later chapters on the atomic world are also good, although to me not as interesting. The final chapters on human evolution are a bit cursory, but still good if you haven't read much in this area already.

[Dennis Littrell · Rating 5 out of 5]

Interesting, entertaining, and all over the place!

This is an amazingly ambitious book, presuming as it does to take us from the very smallest thing imaginable (the Planck limit) to the very largest (the extent of the cosmos), from the very earliest time (the Big Bang) to the heat death of the universe.

But this is not just about the physical sciences. Potter goes deeply into philosophy and biology as well. In a sense he is doing what I have done all my life, that is to look at all aspects of our existence and knowledge in an attempt to understand who I am, why I am here, and where I am going. I think Potter, who is something of social critic as well as a scientific generalist and journalist, does an admirable job. I have read other books that attempt something like this. Potter's is one of the most readable.

Potter begins with an "Orientation." We are here--at this point in time, at this place in the universe, at this stage of awareness. He follows this with Chapter 2: "26 Degrees of Separation," which is the number of degrees of mathematical magnitude in meters we are from the size of the universe (10 to the 26th). Potter gives a plethora of numerical information about things of various sizes, from the size of humans (John Keats was 1.54 meters tall, 5' 0.75 ''; the tallest people are found in Herzogovina and Montenegro where the average height of a male is 1.86 meters) through the distance to the Kuiper Belt (about 7.5 billion kilometers distance) to ultimately the radius of the visible universe (about 13 light years distance).

Next comes Chapter 3, which is about measurements and measuring, which is part of the essence of science; and then comes some ancient philosophy in Chapter 4, "It's Not About You," followed by some classical mechanics in Chapter 5, "Going through the Motions," and so on (you get the idea). In later chapters he explores biology and the very small, ending with musings on what our place in the scheme of things it and what it all means. (I love stuff like this.) Potter writes:

"WE are--everything is--woven out of the primordial hydrogen that filled the universe around 14 billion years ago. Nor need we rest there. WE are--everything is--evolved symmetrical radiation. And before that, WE are something that is beyond whatever before can mean. I am here. You are there. We are everything and everywhere. They are us." (p. 273)

His is a sort of idealistic view that I find somewhat irresistible. I like to say that on the ether wind or thereabouts, somewhere beyond the extent of our instruments and our imaginations there exists in a form not clear to us the information that is you and I and everything that has ever been or will be. (I also believe that life is a cosmic joke and death is nothing to fear.)

Some observations: "Leibniz took the view that time and space do not have a fundamental existence but are merely the means to describe the relationship between things." (p. 50). I believe that Einstein took a similar position. My sense is that time and space (spacetime) do not exist without matter/energy.

Potter writes, "Mars has no atmosphere because its magnetic field is too weak." (p. 204) Actually Mars has a rather thin atmosphere, enough though to produce winds storms that could affect NASA gear.

Here's something that I gave a "huh?" or a "wtf?" to: "Artificial selection could…be used as an argument against natural selection. In artificial selection mankind gets to choose what lives and what does not, which is no different from the kind of intervention that some all-powerful god might make." (p. 218)

Actually "mankind" (better is "humankind") does not do the choosing all by his lonesome. The animals being selected are using their wiles to be artificially selected and indeed human preferences are determined by natural selection.

There are other places in the text where Potter expresses views that have raised the eyebrows of readers other than myself. But in a book of this sort in which one of the ideas is to speculate a lot about things far and wide, I think this is okay.

Talking about the permutations (or is it combinations?) of DNA, Potter notes that there are 2 to the two thousandth ways that humans can be differently expressed. (p. 223) (That many possible humans!) He also notes that this number is the biggest in the book easily dwarfing such numbers as the number of atoms in the universe or the number of unique neuronal pathways in the brain.

"…[W]hen we know how life emerges from the inanimate, the organic and inorganic worlds will have become a continuous spectrum. Life will be an artificial distinction we make from the inanimate." (p. 232) Nice.

"Some bacteria have been found in rocks 1,000 metres underground slowly digesting organic material without the aid of oxygen and dividing only once every thousand years or so…" (p. 233) Every thousand years or so--amazing!

Despite some errors and some unlikely ideas, this is a most interesting and entertaining book.

--Dennis Littrell, author of “The World Is Not as We Think It Is”

[Richard · Rating 5 out of 5]

Science has a long history of making humans less important. The earth is no longer seen as the center of the universe, the sun is no longer seen as the center of the galaxy, and our galaxy is no longer seen as especially unique. We live on a rather small sun near the edge of a small galaxy in the vastness of space so can we, the residents of this speck, be of any unique significance?

I have read dozens of books on cosmology, astronomy, quantum physics, and evolution but Christopher Potter's book stands out among them. He starts off by describing, exponentially, the vast size of the universe and then turns around and, with negative exponents, shows the smallness of subatomic particles. It is a very large world and a very small one with humans existing somewhere in the middle.

Is life on Earth unique in the universe? As Carl Sagan so eloquently put it, “The universe is a pretty big place. If it's just us, seems like an awful waste of space.” And, of course, how do you define life or consciousness? Again our parochialism comes to the fore - we focus on what we can see, even though we can sense only a small part of the electromagnetic spectrum, and we compare everything to how it relates to humans - as if we are the center of the universe.

History is full of people being angry at science because it makes them feel small - just read the today's newspapers to see that this conflict is alive and well. In reality, science is actually showing how special the universe is and how amazing it is that life exists on earth at all. Of course, we all talking about all life, not just humans, which, again, makes some people feel diminished.

Potter goes into a great deal of detail about the evolution of the universe since the big bang; the evolution of earth, the evolution of life, the evolution of the species, and the evolution of science. This really is a condensed history of the universe - from the human perspective.

While there are far denser tomes, this book does put a lot of detailed scientific information into a relatively few pages. If you are not into science or find the details of the math too much to comprehend, I still recommend this book if only for the final chapter. Potter, in the chapter We Are There, does an excellent job of summing up the discoveries, the history, and the remaining questions scientists face in their search to understand the universe, and ourselves.

[Teddy West · Rating 1 out of 5]

This book crawls on the thin border between faith in God and faith in Science, just like its author is a failed mix of Christopher Robin and Harry Potter.

The book is written by a 50 y.o man, but is in the style of a 16 y.o. boy with pimples, who wants both to make Mum proud ("For my mother"), and to explain us the Universe.

"...So why are we so exercised about what might become of us in the far reaches of time, except out of a vain desire to control the fate of the universe itself? We might be less bullying of the universe if we were more aware that the universe as we understand it is not separate from us. Try as we might, and however we describe it, we are inseparable from the universe. The universe is portable."

Deep...

You want more?

"...Our DNA shows us that there is a we that is all living things all sharing the same DNA code: 3 billion years of evolving life. But why stop there? We are - everything is - woven out of primordial hydrogen that filled the universe around 14 billion years ago. Nor need we rest there. We are - everything is - evolved symmetrical radiation. And before that, we are something that is beyond whatever before can mean. I am here. You are there. We are everything and everywhere. They are us..."

OK, let's stop here. Be my guests if you want to buy and read the book!

When all is said and done, let's all remember the funny words of Immanuel Kant that Karl Popper put at the beginning of his "Open Society":

"Yet I do not wish to hide the fact that I can only look with repugnance upon the puffed-up pretentiousness of all these volumes filled with wisdom, such as are fashionable nowadays. For I am fully satisfied that the accepted methods must endlessly increase these follies and blunders, and
that even the complete annihilation of all these fanciful achievements could not possibly be as harmful as this fictitious science, with its accursed fertility." (Kant)

[Varan Merten · Rating 4 out of 5]

I feel it's unfair to rate this book at all. It is great for what it is, a Humanities major's guide to science, with a special emphasis on cosmology. But in this age of YouTube science communicators of the caliber of PBS Spacetime and others, it just can't compete. This is not, strictly speaking, the fault of the book, but I would recommend it only to elderly people who prefer turning pages to clicking thumbnails. That being said, it is well-organized, and in no way talks down to the reader. Potter is a talented writer. His main strength is how honest he is. He comes across as a man who is well-read in his own right, but still possessed of a sense of wonder and respect for his topic(s). Unlike many who have attempted what he does here, he does not bemoan the difficulty of the subject, but allows the freedom to breathe, and thus allows the reader to take it in on its own merits. This alone shoots my rating up to the fourth star. It's a quick read, too. Very digestible. Check it out on a rainy day when you're thinking about the Big Bang.

[Daniel Caballero López · Rating 5 out of 5]

Es un libro sobre ciencia enfocado en la astronomía, no cuenta de donde estamos en el cosmos desde las distancias mas grandes enfocandose en la relatividad general, hasta lo mas pequeño centrandose enla mecánica cuántica.

Dedica un capítico a plantear de si hay vida en el universo y otro sobre la evolución del Homo Sapiens como especie.

Me ha guastado mucho el libro y lo recomiendo es muy ilustrativo.

[Katyayni · Rating 1 out of 5]

I usually like non-fiction science books that talk about the universe and everything about it. Unfortunately, this book is not just boring, but it's also just Wikipedia pages put together as factoids. The authour hides behind metaphors and poetic phrases, but failed to pull me into the book enough to finish it.

[Neil Aplin · Rating 4 out of 5]

Quite a large part of the book covers the history of the universe, and also the extent of the universe, which is a bit tedious, but the later chapters are fascinating, and the end chapter is really thought provoking. And an extra bonus for me was the chapter later in the book about paleoanthropology, wonderful!!

[Joseph Donigian · Rating 5 out of 5]

An excellent primer

Christopher Potter tells an engaging story about the smallness of physics and the large-scale of astronomical units. He explains atoms, electrons and compares it with the hugeness of the solar system and universes that are out there.

[Cassandra · Rating 3 out of 5]

I found it very interesting and a "simplified" approach for people out of the science field. However, I also found the bibliography too short and the line "I used sites that were too numerous to be named, but of exceptional quality" everything but scientific.

[David Hosier · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was a shockingly expensive yet straightforward history of the world/universe in terms of astrophysics, particle physics, and evolution. It kind of covered everything. I didn't know where it was going at first, but then I didn't want it to end.

[Sabra · Rating 2 out of 5]

Rounded up a 1/2 star - most of the book was just really hard to read and not very interesting. It improved once it went from quantum physics to things on a more universal/terran/human scale.

[Jim · Rating 5 out of 5]

Lively, witty and highly readable.

[Oleg Nikulin · Rating 2 out of 5]

Компиляция Википедии.

[Jef · Rating 4 out of 5]

Een mix van kosmologie, quantumfysica en evolutietheorie. Vakkennis is niet vereist, het leest vlot.

[Andre Pessoa · Rating 5 out of 5]

Adorei esse livro. Ciência de forma clara e belíssima.

[Linda · Rating 3 out of 5]

I enjoyed this as long as the author was discussing astronomy. Not so much when he veered off into the subjects of geology, biology, philosophy, and mysticism.

[Janneke · Rating 4 out of 5]

Niet slecht, meer een mega lang essay omdat het grotendeels mening en Wikipedia onderzoek bevat maar wel makkelijk samengevat en een interessant aanzicht vanuit Potter