View a FREE sample

Introduction by Carl Sagan

• Carl Sagan writes the Introduction from Cornell University in Ithaca, New York.

• The Introduction begins with the observation that adults don't concern themselves with questions of how the universe works, but that children are interested in these questions.

• Adults often use religion to answer fundamental questions.
• The assumption that the universe must have an end, since it has a beginning, is based on human experiences.

• Physicists do not make assumptions about the universe based on human experience because the universe is too complex.

• Philosophers and scientists view the world very differently, but are concerned with the same fundamental questions.

• Stephen Hawking was inducted into the Royal Society of London in 1974 and has Lou Gehrig's disease.

Chapter 1 Our Picture of the Universe

• The universe has been looked at many different ways throughout history, and maybe one day our current views will be outdated.

• The Ancient...

(read more Chapter Abstracts)

This section contains 3,076 words (approx. 11 pages at 300 words per page) View a FREE sample