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Why the Wind Blows and Other Mysteries of the Atmosphere
Harcourt
August 2007
On Sale: August 6, 2007
288 pages
ISBN: 0151011249
EAN: 9780151011247
Hardcover
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Non-Fiction
We spend our lives surrounded by air, hardly even noticing
it. It’s the most miraculous substance on earth, yet
responsible for our food, our weather, our water, and our
ability to hear. In fact, we live at the bottom of an ocean
of air. In this exuberant book, gifted science writer
Gabrielle Walker peels back the layers of our atmosphere
with the stories of the people who uncovered its secrets: • A flamboyant Renaissance Italian discovers how heavy our
air really is: The air filling Carnegie Hall, for example,
weighs seventy thousand pounds. • A one-eyed barnstorming pilot finds a set of winds that
constantly blow five miles above our heads. • An impoverished American farmer figures out why hurricanes
move in a circle by carving equations with his pitchfork on
a barn door. • A well-meaning inventor nearly destroys the ozone layer. • A reclusive mathematical genius predicts, thirty years
before he’s proved right, that the sky contains a layer of
floating metal fed by the glowing tails of shooting stars.
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