What's Gotten Into You
The Story of Your Body's Atoms, from the Big Bang Through Last Night's Dinner
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- $36.99
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- $36.99
Publisher Description
For readers of Bill Bryson, Neil deGrasse Tyson and Siddhartha Mukherjee, a wondrous, wildly ambitious, and vastly entertaining work of popular science that tells the awe-inspiring story of the elements that make up the human body, and how these building blocks of life travelled billions of miles and across billions of years to make us who we are.
Every one of us contains a billion times more atoms than all the grains of sand in the earth’s deserts. If you weigh 150 pounds, you’ve got enough carbon to make 25 pounds of charcoal, enough salt to fill a saltshaker, enough chlorine to disinfect several backyard swimming pools, and enough iron to forge a 3-inch nail. But how did these elements combine to make us human?
All matter—everything around us and within us—has an ultimate birthday: the day the universe was born. This informative, eye-opening, and eminently readable book is the story of our atoms’ long strange journey from the Big Bang to the creation of stars, through the assembly of Planet Earth, and the formation of life as we know it. It’s also the story of the scientists who made groundbreaking discoveries and unearthed extraordinary insights into the composition of life. Behind their unexpected findings were investigations marked by fierce rivalries, obsession, heartbreak, flashes of insight, and flukes of blind luck. Ultimately they’ve helped us understand the mystery of our existence: how a quadrillion atoms made of particles from the Big Bang now animate each of our cells.
Shaped by the curious mind and bold vision of science and history documentarian Dan Levitt, this wondrous book is no less than the story of life itself.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Documentarian Levitt sheds light on the tiniest bits of what humans are made of in his stellar debut. "Carl Sagan once famously said we are made of star stuff," Levitt writes in his introduction. "This is the improbable story of how it happened." Levitt covers the big bang, which led to the creation of "every particle in your body"; describes how elements are made within stars; outlines how the water that runs "through our veins" made its way to Earth ("humongous snowy dirt balls" are one theory, asteroids another); explains the nature of DNA; and extrapolates on how the food one eats "create a living person." Along the way, Levitt offers snapshot biographies of scientists: astronomer Cecilia Payne, for example, "transformed our view of how stars work," and photosynthesis was discovered in 1779 by "a well-coiffed forty-nine-year-old Dutch physician and natural philosopher named Jan Ingenhousz." The author claims that "to retrace the journeys of our atoms is to appreciate the world anew," and his winning mix of astronomy, physics, biology, and chemistry will help readers do just that. This is marvelous.
