You Are Here: A portable History of the Universe by Christopher Potter

Towards the beginning, he makes us familiar with the concept of size. The size we're most familiar with is our own, of course. But it's easy to grasp the size of the giraffe, which is slightly more than three times the height of a human, just as we can understand that a python can be five times as long as us. Neither did I have much trouble visualising a whale, Nelson's column or the Empire State Building. We can see five kilometres ahead of us on a flat landscape, and we might, one day, be able to build a skyscraper that is 18 kilometres high.

Next, Potter takes you into the atmosphere, the stratosphere, and beyond. It's dizzying. There are satellites thousands of kilometres above the earth.

One satellite, known as Vela 1A, orbits the earth at a distance of more than 100,000 kilometres. The moon is 400,000 kilometres away. The sun is 150 million kilometres distant from us, Jupiter more than a billion, Neptune more than four billion.

And these are just the really close things. The solar system extends "50,000 times the distance from the earth to the sun". And do you know the really spooky thing? At the edge of our solar system, we can't see much, because there's not much sunlight. What we see, when we look at the sky, are other solar systems, which are much, much further away than ours. For instance, the closest proper star, Alpha Centauri, is more than four light years away — that's 40,000 billion kilometres..

And this star, like our own sun, will eventually explode, and then gradually cool down, and disappear.

In the universe, this sort of thing happens all the time.

So how do we know this? Well, maybe we don't.

According to current thought, more or less everything everybody has thought about the universe, ever, has not been true. For instance: we're trapped on a disc between two huge sheets of water (The Sumerians). We are an imperfect version of an ideal world that's out of sight (Plato). God built it in six days (The Bible). Everything moves around according to strict laws of gravity (Newton). All nonsense. As Potter points out, Newton might not have discovered the laws of the universe at all — perhaps "invented" would be a better term.

Then there's Einstein, who said that objects were really just information about energy, the most significant expression of which was light. Einstein told us that, if nothing could move faster than light, there could be no such thing as time. Light is made of photons, which are tiny, and Potter takes us, superbly, into the world of tiny things — atoms and the particles they are made of. And the big thing about tiny things is that, just like extremely large things such as stars, they don't behave in the way you'd expect them to.

To recap, then: we don't understand things that are large, and we don't understand things that are small. We have a lot of work to do. But Potter will inspire lots of people to think about these things.

Along the way, he tells us about the world's great thinkers — from Heraclitus, through Plato, Ptolemy, Copernicus, Galileo, Newton, Einstein, Heisenberg, Dirac and Feynman. At the end, he treats us to a history of evolution. I relished every page..

Synopsis by Foyles.co.uk

"You Are Here" is a dazzling exploration of the universe and our relationship to it. It is the story of how something evolved from nothing, and how something became everything. It is the story of science: the greatest story ever told. Here, for the first time in a single span, is the life of the universe, from quarks to galaxy super-clusters, and from slime to Homo sapiens. The universe was once a moment of perfect symmetry, and is now 13.7 billion years of history. Clouds of gas were woven into whatever complexity we find in the universe today: the hierarchies of stars, or the brains of mammals. With wit and erudition, Christopher Potter takes us on a voyage beyond even time and space, to present the state of scientific knowledge at its most up-to-date and exhilarating.