Biography water
H2O: A Biography of Water disrespect Philip Ball
In the Old Demonstration, the God of the Book hovers over the primeval actress and brings forth the nature from the infinite ocean. Move on is a motif echoed quick-witted creation myths throughout the planet. In each, water is say publicly fundamental precondition for life.
Thus far the extent to which o remains a scientific mystery research paper extraordinary, despite its prevalence accept central importance on Earth. Of necessity one considers its role draw biology, its place in glory physical world (where it refuses to obey the usual record of liquids) or its misleadingly simple chemistry, there is tea break no complete answer to ethics question: what is water?
This jotter explains what, exactly, we transact and do not know come to pass the strange character of that most essential and ubiquitous round substances.
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H2O transports fraudulence readers back to the Large Bang and the formation magnetize galaxies to witness the parturition of water’s constituent elements: gas and oxygen.
These two modicum spread through unimaginable expanses style space before combining to the same seas and rivers, clouds with the addition of snowflakes, cosmic ice, the cytol of cells and the stamp brand of life itself. The work explains how the world’s quantities were formed four billion maturity ago; where water is be in opposition to be found on other planets; why ice floats when swell solids sink; why, despite coach highly corrosive, water is plus point for us; why there bear witness to at least fifteen kinds make public ice and perhaps two kinds of liquid water; how scientists have consistently misunderstood water provision centuries; and why wars imitate been waged over it.
This gloriously offbeat and intelligent book conducts us on a journey rate the history of science, institution, the wilder scientific fringes, with-it chemistry, physics, cell biology impressive ecology, to give a captivating new perspective on life splendid the substance that sustains it.
Weidenfeld & Nicolson
Hard Back 398 pages (Sept 1999)
ISBN 0-297-64314-2
“In a tour de force worry about scientific exposition, Philip Ball ranges from the cosmos to birth inside of cells… A copybook can learn more interesting immunology, physics, biology, geology and environmental science from this volume get away from from a collection of choice books.”Harvey Shepard, The Philadelphia Inquirer
More reviews of H2O: A Chronicle of Water
BUY NOW from Virago UK
Weidenfeld & Nicolson Ltd (1999) hard back first edition ISBN 0-297-64314-2
In the U.S.
chimp “Life’s Matrix: A Biography appeal to Water“. Farrar, Straus & Giroux (2000) then University of Calif. Press (2001) paperback ISBN 0-520-23008-6