The Physics of History

1 The Vast Reaches of Time and Space / 2 Fundamentally, What's the World Made Of? / 3 Energy in the Atomic World / 4 The Atomic Basis of the Senses / 5 Radioactivity—Nature's Imperturbable Clock / 6 From Detecting Forgeries to the First Art / 7 Watching Plaster Dry—And Dating It / 8 We Are What We Eat—The History of Diet / 9 A Plant Is What It Eats—Tracing Agriculture / 10 Tree Rings—Seasons of the Past 12,000 Years / 11 Ice Cores—Climate Records for 800 Millennia / 12 Ocean Sediments Reveal 5 Million Years / 13 A Bad Day in June—Death of the Dinosaurs / 14 The Origin and Early History of Life / 15 The History of Earth's Atmosphere / 16 The Age of the Solar System / 17 What Happened before the Sun Was Born? / 18 Atoms Are Star Stuff—Cooking Up Carbon / 19 The Lives of Big Stars—Cooking Up Big Atoms / 20 Relativity—Space and Time Become Spacetime / 21 (Almost) Everything Is Relative / 22 Matter Vanishes; Light Speed Is Breached? / 23 The Limits of Vision—13.7 Billion Years Ago / 24 The First Few Minutes—Where It All Began