Reseña del libro "Astonishing Science (en Inglés)"
360 things about the world you live in, and how anybody knows them.European pharmacies sold powdered Egyptian mummy as a standard drug from the twelfth century into the eighteenth, and buyers complained of imitations made from recent corpses. The Indian Ocean tsunami of 2004 stood about sixty centimetres above the surrounding sea in open water, and a satellite crossing the Bay of Bengal two hours later measured it by accident. A cancer paper written to be fatally flawed was accepted by 157 of the 304 open-access journals it was sent to.None of these are the versions you half-remember. All of them are true, and this book shows you exactly how anyone established them.360 entries. Eight chapters. Two independent sources behind every single fact.Each entry runs about a hundred words and works the same way: the fact first, then the reason it is true, then the number that leads to the works it came from. Nothing is left as a bare claim. Where two accounts genuinely differ, the entry says so instead of picking whichever reads better. Where a familiar story turned out to be wrong, you get the plain version and the point at which somebody improved it.What is insideEight chapters working outward from your own body to the mind, medicine, the living world, the ground, the ocean, and the light and gravity it all runs onA final chapter on how science checks itself, and how often the checking fails360 source entries printed at the back, numbered to match the facts, with two independent works behind each oneBoxed questions scattered through the chapters, written to be asked out loud at a tableA ten-question quiz closing every chapter, with the answers together at the backA note on method explaining the two tests every entry had to passNot a book of wonder. There is no breathless writing here, no claims about what science will do next, and nothing a reader is asked to take on trust. What was found, who found it, how, and what it took to be sure. The rest is left to the reader.Open it anywhere. Nothing here builds on anything before it. Read three entries and put it down, or read forty and miss your stop. Read more
