Book description
Every atom in our bodies has an extraordinary history. Our blood, our
food, our books, our clothes - everything contains atoms forged in
blistering furnaces deep inside stars, which were blown into space by
those stars' cataclysmic explosions and deaths. From red giants - stars
so enormous they could engulf a million suns - to supernova explosions -
the most violent events in the universe - the birth of every atom was
marked by cosmic events on an enormous scale, against a backdrop of
unimaginable heat and cold, brightness and darkness, space and time. But
how did we discover the astonishing truth about our cosmic origins? THE
MAGIC FURNACE is Marcus Chown's extraordinary account of how scientists
unravelled the mystery of atoms, and helped to explain the dawn of life.
It is one of the greatest detective stories in the history of science.
In fact, it is two puzzles intertwined, for the stars contain the key to
unlocking the secret of atoms, and the atoms the solution to the secret
of stars. Marcus Chown is
New Scientist's
cosmology consultant. He is the author of Afterglow of Creation,
which was runner-up for the Rhône- Poulenc Science Book Prize, and was
the winner of the 1994 Glaxo Wellcome ABSW Science Writers' Award.
