Walking Zero: Discovering Cosmic Space and Time along the Prime Meridian Book

Noted science writer Chet Raymo explores how we found our place in space and time, and what it has meant to humankind.

In Walking Zero, Chet Raymo uses the Prime Meridian—the line of zero longitude and the standard for all the world's maps and clocks—to tell the story of humandkind's intellectual journey from a cosmos not much larger than ourselves to the universe of the galaxies and geologic eons.

As in his highly praised The Path and Climbing Brandon, Raymo connects personally with the story by walking England's Prime Meridian from Brighton through Greenwich to the North Sea. The Prime Meridian passes near a surprising number of landmarks that loom large in science: Isaac Newton's chambers at Trinity College, Cambridge; Charles Darwin's home at Down, in Kent; the site where the first dinosaur fossils were discovered; and John Harrison's clocks in a museum room of the Royal Observatory, among many others. Visiting them in turn, Raymo brings to life the human dramas of courageous individuals who bucked reigning orthodoxies to expand our horizons, including one brave rebel who paid the ultimate price for surmising the multitude of worlds we now take for granted.

A splendid short history of astronomy and geology, Walking Zero illuminates the startling interplay of science, psychology, faith, and the arts in our understanding of space and time.

Publishers Weekly

The latest from noted science writer Raymo (An Intimate Look at the Night Sky) isn't merely a history of the prime meridian, the zero-longitude line passing through eastern England that is the starting point for measuring both space and time on Earth. Roughly speaking, Raymo is interested in how we understand our place in the cosmos, and his walk along the prime meridian is a meditation on the evolving ways that humans have measured and understood space and time, stopping here and there at some of the most prominent landmarks in the history of science. The slender volume covers an astonishing amount of ground, ranging from the astronomers of ancient Alexandria to the fellows of the British Royal Society, from Piltdown Man to contemporary debates over relativism and scientific knowledge. The result is an unexpected combination of popular history, travelogue and intellectual memoir, as meandering and invigorating as a brisk country walk, and while there is little here that hasn't been recounted elsewhere, the real joy is in the journey-one could hardly ask for a better travel companion than Raymo, a professor emeritus of physics and astronomy whose prose is delightfully erudite and introspective. 25 b&w illus., 1 map. (May) Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.