THE GRAND CONTRAPTION: The World as Myth, Number, and Chance By David Park Princeton University Press | $29.95
David Park's new book, The Grand Contraption, seeks to tell the story of Western explanations of the universe--the contraption we are in and a part of--from the ancient Greeks to the present. In fact, The Grand Contraption addresses the history of three questions: What are we standing on? What is above us? What is all the stuff in the world? Park, emeritus professor of physics at Williams College and author of several popular science books, has written a book of maps and measurements: guesses about the sky, the Earth, and the nature of matter, and the attempts to ...