A Matter of Degrees: What Temperature Reveals about the Past and Future of Our Species, Planet, and U niverse

Buoyancy comes from filling much of the space in the hull with syntactic foam, a substance that is both light and resistant to pressure.

The communality of the anatomy of brain structure explains a great deal about the shared response of many species to a rise in core temperature, but the effort to move toward a warmer location as a response to infection seems to be so universal that it becomes attractive to look for its origins beyond the vertebrates. After all, insects also respon

I came into the room which was half dark, and presently spotted Lord Kelvin in the audience and realized that I was in for trouble at the last part of my speech dealing with the age of the earth, where my views conflicted with his. To my relief, Kelvin fell fast asleep, but as I came to the important point, I saw the old bird sit up, open an eye an

Faraday’s experiments, simple and elegant, were carefully recorded in lab books that he bound himself, remembering the profession he had so happily left. In modern language, we would say he was a great chemist and a great physicist; Faraday described himself as a natural philosopher. With an uncanny gift for recognizing the salient points of an exp

It is sometimes argued that our body temperature is set at 98.6 degrees for the same reason that we feel comfortable in a room at 70 degrees. A little over two million years ago, humans emerged in Africa in sites where the median daily temperature is in the low 70s. Thus, a body temperature in the high 90s optimizes the necessary dissipation of hea

I’m taking a different path, using the measurement of temperature as a guide in exploring many aspects of science.

As Chandra later remembered, “The moral is that a certain modesty toward science always pays in the end. These people (Eddington …) terribly clever, of great intellectual ability, terribly perceptive in many ways, lost out because they did not have the modesty to say ‘I am going to learn what physics teaches me.’ They wanted to dictate how physics

While I don’t claim to offer an overarching view of science, I stress the connections of the approaches as well as of the solutions. Temperature is the thread.