If you are among the many who think of billions, or a hundred thousand, or tens of millions of years ago as all just "a very very long time ago," The Big Bang to Now: All of Time in Six Chunks will be an enlightening surprise. Terry Sissons divides time into six chunks - fewer numbers than are in a telephone number - to create a review of the 13.7 billion years of all of time. The surprise is that learning just these six chunks can transform one's understanding of time from grand confusion to quite amazing clarity. The Big Bang to Now is not packed with dense pages detailing what scientists have learned about our past. These details are important, but learning too much detail before one sees the big picture often leads not to knowledge and understanding but to bewilderment. The Big Bang to Now tells the story of time in less than 100 key events, and with a large amount of reassuring white space. Each page describes just one important event, like the Big Bang, the creation of our solar system, the emergence of life on Earth, man's first appearance. A facing page bullets important points and ongoing questions that are alternatively fun, fascinating, and thought-provoking. As a result, the book leaves the reader with a coherent structure within which new discoveries and learning can be fitted into the larger context. It also makes it possible to answer many questions without looking up the answers at all. Questions like: -Did early man hunt dinosaurs? -Was the universe ever completely dark? -Where did the atoms and molecules that make up our bodies come from? -Did hunter-gatherer societies have writing? -When did we start to use the wheel? Or start to wear clothes? Or domesticate animals? -Will Earth ever have another Ice Age? If so, when will it happen? How long will it last? -Why are some animals extinct? What causes extinctions at all? Whether you think our past can help us make better decisions for our future, or want to decide if the discoveries of science deepens or contradicts religious belief, it's a book that reveals a sometimes baffling, sometimes brutal, always amazing universe.
About the Author: Terry Herman Sissons is a cognitive psychologist who majored in anthropology and received her Ph.D. from the New School for Social Research. She has applied her research findings into the way the human mind learns to understand numbers to create a book that makes the daunting universe of time comprehensible to most people. Dr. Sissons has held a tenured position at Montclair State University, taught at Bard College in upstate New York, and was the principal on a children's educational television series in New York. The recipient of several teaching awards, the author has published articles on cognitive development and written a successful text book on creating effective learning environments. She now divides her time between the United States and Cambridge, England.