Throughout, we are treated to vignettes and anecdotes from the lives of the scientists and inventors who worked with air and air pressure.Īnyone who has even a passing interest in science will enjoy this it’s accessible and you don’t really need any background to understand what’s going on. We see how the US military made efforts to create weather control (with little success). We learn of the first lighter than air balloons by the Montgolfier brothers (and how Parisian peasants attacked one when it landed thinking it was a monster). Over the course of Caesar’s Last Breath, Kean walks us through the history of humankind’s gradual discoveries about the air around us: how it moves, what’s in it, how we interact with it. We don’t just breathe Caesar’s last breath, we breathe everybody’s breath, all the time. Some of them escape into space, some combine into other molecules, but most just stay in the air. So, over a surprisingly short amount of time, the billons and billons of atoms that flow with every breath reaches every corner of the Earth.
Seems ridiculous that 2000 years later this could still be possible, but Sam Kean explains quite well how this really works.īasically, atoms are really small, and breath, being just air, flows quickly and is easily spread around and diffused. The title is based on the old idea that every breath you take contains some of the air that Caesar exhaled upon his death. Lively, witty, and filled with the astounding science of ordinary life, Caesar's Last Breath illuminates the science stories swirling around us every second.Sam Kean’s Caesar’s Last Breath is a gas. Along the way, we'll swim with radioactive pigs, witness the most important chemical reactions humans have discovered, and join the crowd at the Moulin Rouge for some of the crudest performance art of all time. Tracing the origins and ingredients of our atmosphere, Kean reveals how the alchemy of air reshaped our continents, steered human progress, powered revolutions, and continues to influence everything we do. Of the sextillions of molecules entering or leaving your lungs at this moment, some might well bear traces of Cleopatra's perfumes, German mustard gas, particles exhaled by dinosaurs or emitted by atomic bombs, even remnants of stardust from the universe's creation.
On the ides of March, 44 BC, Julius Caesar died of stab wounds on the Senate floor, but the story of his last breath is still unfolding in fact, you're probably inhaling some of it now. With every breath, you literally inhale the history of the world. In Caesar's Last Breath, New York Times bestselling author Sam Kean takes us on a journey through the periodic table, around the globe, and across time to tell the story of the air we breathe, which, it turns out, is also the story of earth and our existence on it.
0 kommentar(er)
