Chapter 1: Wonderful Eclipses
Perhaps that was the necessary condition of planetary life: your Sun must fit your Moon. -- Martin Amis
Chapter 2: At Home On A Data Recorder
Chapter 3: Peering Down
Plate tectonics plays at least three crucial roles in maintaining animal life -- it may be that plate tectonics is the central requirement for life on a planet and that it is necessary for keeping a world supplied with water. -- Peter D Ward and Donald Brownlee
Chapter 4: Peering Up
The combined circumstances that we live on Earth and are able to see stars -- that the conditions necessary for life do not exclude those necessary for vision, and vice versa -- is a remarkably improbable one. -- Hans Blumenberg
Chapter 5: The Pale Blue Dot In Relief
Chapter 6: Our Helpful Neighbors
At each step along the way, the Solar System has served as a perspicacious teacher, posing questions just difficult enough to prompt new observations and calculations that have led to fresh insights, but not so difficult that any further study becomes mired in a morass of confusing detail. -- Ivars Peterson
Chapter 7: Star Probes
Chapter 8: Our Galactic Habitat
Chapter 9: Our Place in Cosmic Time
The progress made in our understanding of the universe during the twentieth century is nothing short of stunning. -- Michael S. Turner
Chapter 10: A Universe Fine-Tunes for Live and Discovery
There is for me powerful evidence that there is something going on behind it all ... It seems as though somebody has fine-tuned nature's numbers to make the Universe ... The impression of design is overwhelming. -- Paul Davies
Chapter 11: The Revisionist History of the Copernican Revolution
If Copernicus taught us the lesson that we are not at the center of things, our present picture of the universe rubs it in. -- Robert Kirshner
Chapter 12: The Copernican Principle
Because of the reflection of sunlight ... the Earth seems to be sitting in a beam of light, as if there were some special significance to this small world ... -- Carl Sagan
Don't you just love the Sagan alliteration in that last quote?
Chapter 13: The Anthropic Disclaimer
The next battle of the Copernican revolution is thrust upon us. Just as our planet has no special status within our Solar System,and our Solar System has no special location within the universe, our universe has no special status within the vast cosmic melange of universes that comprise our multiverse. -- Fred Adams and Greg Laughlin
I can't wait to re-read this chapter.
Chapter 14: SETI and the Unraveling of The Copernican Principle
Chapter 15: A Universe Designed for Discovery
Chapter 16: The Skeptical Rejoinder
A fair result can be obtained only by fully stating and balancing the facts and arguments on both sides of each question. -- Charles Darwin
I wish the warmists would accept that. I have.
Conclusion: Reading the Book of Nature
No comments:
Post a Comment