This Is Life: A Journey From Inside Your Body to Beyond Earth

"A journey through space, time, biology, quantum physics, and the universe's past and future, to answer the question, What do we really know about life? In this sequel to his best-selling The Universe in Your Hand, world-renowned theoretical physicist Christophe Galfard invites us to travel from Earth to the wider reaches of the cosmos, to travel among stars and black holes, to see how everything in our universe is connected. On Earth, Galfard looks for places where traces of the past are still apparent before embarking on a roller-coaster ride through the gravity hills of space-time, reconstructing the history of our world and that of the universe in order to understand where life has come from. With Galfard as a guide, we meet bacteria and viruses and are introduced to the cells that form the basis of all known life. The search for answers will take us from our place in space and time; to the past; to some of the most remote places on our planet, where life has remained isolated from the rest of the world for thousands of years; and out to distant places in the Solar System. To teach us about evolution, Galfard takes us to Canada, to the Burgess Shale, to Greenland, China, and Antarctica, where today we find fossils formed hundreds of millions of years ago. We experience the demise of the dinosaurs, the birth of the Earth, the creation of the very "stuff of life" in outer space, and many more recent discoveries. This Is Life offers a glimpse of other worlds beyond the Solar System, detected only in recent years. On these worlds, life might be thriving-a fact that Galfard believes will be confirmed within his lifetime, thanks to the new generation of telescopes. We are left with the overwhelming sense that we belong to a reality that is far greater and weirder than we know, and filled with possibilities beyond what we might have imagined"--