Apollo's Fire
A Journey Through the Extraordinary Wonders of an Ordinary Day
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- $6.99
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- $6.99
Publisher Description
It?s the oldest story on Earth. You relive it every day.
So much of our shared daily experience in the world is shaped by the sometimes dramatic, sometimes subtle effects of the Earth?s spin, its tilt on its axis, the alternation of light and darkness, the waxing and waning of the moon, the seemingly capricious growth of clouds. The ancient rhythm of the day and night was shaping life on Earth before there were even human beings to appreciate it. It rules our bodies and weather and calendars, and sets the tempo for our work and play. Each of us awakens each day to relive this primordial narrative.
With his signature blend of science and poetry, history and mythology, Michael Sims serves as tour guide on an unforgettable journey through the wonders of an ordinary day, from dawn to nighttime. Long before we had the tools of knowledge to explain what we observed in the skies overhead, we built mythologies and folklore around these occurrences, immortalized them in poetry and art, created special places for them in our collective imagination and even our language. In Apollo?s Fire, Sims explores the celestial events that form our days, fusing lively explanations of these phenomena with a richly layered history of what they meant to us before we knew how they worked. He explains the colors of sunrise, the characteristics of shadow, the mysteries of twilight. Characters in this vital drama include Galileo watching sunrise on the moon, Eratosthenes measuring the Earth with a noontime shadow, and Edgar Allan Poe figuring out why the night sky is dark instead of glowing with the light of a million suns. Our story ranges from the movie High Noon to Darwin?s plant experiments, from The Time Machine to the afternoon rise in air pollution.In the witty and elegant style that has earned him the designation ?science raconteur,? Sims weaves a dazzling array of strands into a single tapestry of daily experience- and makes the oldest story on Earth new again.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
What could be more poetic than the bare facts of the cosmos?" asks Sims (Adam's Navel), an acclaimed science writer with a flair for giving reality the luster of myth. Here he takes a single day and guides readers through the history of what we know, and what we've imagined, about sunrises, clouds and other natural phenomena. From the opening passage, which recalls a scene from Joyce's Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Sims delights in drawing upon a wide variety of cultural sources. In one section, he invokes Juster's The Phantom Tollbooth to stress the importance of shadows; later, he discusses circadian rhythms in the context of Darwin's The Power of Movement in Plants. The hard science is just as vigorously poetic, as when Sims explains how sunlight bounces off the particles in the atmosphere to produce clear blue skies or the reds of twilight. His delightful tour of day and night skies will inspire many readers to look up with a marveling new perspective.