Earth

Professor Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, Profsesor Linda T. Elkins-Tanton (Autoren)

Buch | Softcover

144 Seiten

2017
Bloomsbury Academic (Verlag)
978-1-5013-1791-0 (ISBN)

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A literary scholar and a planetary scientist look at the Earth as object, viewed from the outside, and as a singular orb that is a challenge to scale and human self-importance.

Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things.

In Earth, a planetary scientist and a literary humanist explore what happens when we think of the Earth as an object viewable from space. As a “blue marble,” “a blue pale dot,” or, as Chaucer described it, “this litel spot of erthe,” the solitary orb is a challenge to scale and to human self-importance. Beautiful and self-contained, the Earth turns out to be far less knowable than it at first appears: its vast interior an inferno of incandescent and yet solid rock and a reservoir of water vaster than the ocean, a world within the world. Viewing the Earth from space invites a dive into the abyss of scale: how can humans apprehend the distances, the temperatures, and the time scale on which planets are born, evolve, and die?

Object Lessons is published in partnership with an essay series in The Atlantic.

Jeffrey Jerone Cohen is Dean of Humanities at Arizona State University, USA, and co-president of the Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment. He is the author or editor of 13 books, including Stone: An Ecology of the Inhuman (which received the 2017 René Wellek Prize for best book in comparative literature). Linda T. Elkins-Tanton is a planetary scientist and the Principal Investigator of the NASA Psyche mission. She is the Director of the Space Sciences Laboratory at the University of California, Berkeley, USA. Previously, she was Vice President at Arizona State University, Director of the Department of Terrestrial Magnetism at the Carnegie Institution for Science, and faculty at MIT. She is the author of a six-book series The Solar System (1st edition 2006; 2nd edition 2010) and co-editor, with A. Schmidt and K. Fristad, of Volcanism and Global Environmental Change (2015). Her articles have been published in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, Nature Geoscience, Nature, Annual Review of Earth and Planetary Sciences, and Astrophysical Journal, among other publications.

1. Prologue: Genesis
2. Orbit
3. Ground (Why Earth?)
4. Scale (Barriers to Understanding)
5. Radiance (Earth's beauty)
6. Gravity (Earth's Pull)
7. Interlude: A Hike Around Piestewa Peak
8. Imagination
List of Illustrations
Notes
Index

Erscheinungsdatum	21.02.2017
Reihe/Serie	Object Lessons
Zusatzinfo	12 b/w illustrations
Verlagsort	New York
Sprache	englisch
Maße	122 x 164 mm
Gewicht	136 g
Themenwelt	Sachbuch/Ratgeber ► Natur / Technik ► Natur / Ökologie
	Geisteswissenschaften ► Philosophie
	Geisteswissenschaften ► Sprach- / Literaturwissenschaft ► Anglistik / Amerikanistik
	Geisteswissenschaften ► Sprach- / Literaturwissenschaft ► Literaturwissenschaft
	Naturwissenschaften ► Geowissenschaften ► Geologie
	Sozialwissenschaften
ISBN-10	1-5013-1791-1 / 1501317911
ISBN-13	978-1-5013-1791-0 / 9781501317910
Zustand	Neuware