Outline of Science, Vol 1 (Solo)

This is science frozen in amber. Originally published in 1922, when the 100-inch Mt. Wilson telescope reigned as humanity's greatest eye on the cosmos, J. Arthur Thomson's Outline of Science offers a window into scientific thinking at a pivotal moment. He guides readers through astronomy from the Solar System to the Milky Way, into the strange new world of subatomic matter just being glimpsed through protons and electrons, and across the grand arc of life from simple organisms to the teeming fauna of the natural world. Thomson writes for a general audience with clarity and genuine enthusiasm, showing how observation and experiment had stacked up to form the body of scientific knowledge. But what makes the book irresistible to modern readers is what Thomson could not know. The gaps are as compelling as the certainties: the expanding universe, the internal structure of the atom, the role of DNA in heredity. Here is science on the eve of its greatest revolutions, rendered in graceful prose that captures the wonder of a world still being discovered.