Earth
Subtitle
Object Lessons
In "Earth," a planetary scientist and a literary humanist explore what happens when we think of the Earth as an object viewable from space. As a “blue marble,” “a blue pale dot,” or, as Chaucer described it, “this litel spot of erthe,” the solitary orb is a challenge to scale and to human self-importance. Beautiful and self-contained, the Earth turns out to be far less knowable than it at first appears: its vast interior an inferno of incandescent and yet solid rock and a reservoir of water vaster than the ocean, a world within the world. Viewing the Earth from space invites a dive into the abyss of scale: how can humans apprehend the distances, the temperatures, and the time scale on which planets are born, evolve, and die?
Bios
Jeffrey Jerome Cohen is professor of English and dean of humanities in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at Arizona State University.
Linda T. Elkins-Tanton is the director of the ASU School of Earth and Space Exploration and the principal investigator of the NASA Discovery Mission, Psyche. She is also the author of a six-book series "The Solar System" and her articles have been published in Nature Geoscience, Nature, and Astrophysical Journal, among other publications.
Praise for this book
[An] alchemy of unlikely ideas ... [The authors] reflect on the geological history of the earth and humanity's understanding of it over the millennia.
Sydney Morning Herald
Earth is a magical, unusual, curious book … Cohen and Elkins-Tanton describe it as a “little book about an impossibly large subject.” This subject is made even larger by Cohen and Elkins-Tanton's forays into discussions of beauty, creativity, and imagination (including my favorite question in the book: “Can you die from an overactive imagination?”) and how they connect to science and ultimately this planet. This makes Earth a book that is, ultimately, a testament to what can be discovered if we are brave enough to combine the unexpected.
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