FALLING
UPWARDS
BY RICHARD
HOLMES
OUT NOW
FROM
ALCHEMY TO
CHEMISTRY
IN PICTURE
AND STORY
BY ARTHUR
GREENBERG
OUT NOW
BEYOND UFOS
BY JEFFREY
BENNETT
OUT NOW
AUTHOR’S
BOOKSHELF
Three books that inspired
Sam Kean while writing
Caesar’s Last Breath
“Holmes writes the best kind of
science books, capturing exactly
the wonder and awe that attract
people to science, and that help
pack museums and natural parks
around the world. This book
resurrects the miracle of flight in
the days before airplanes.”
“A fascinating book about the
painful, complicated, and
sometimes amusing transition
that turned disreputable
alchemists into the lions of
modern chemistry. Encyclopaedic
and lavishly illustrated.”
“The first signs of alien life almost
certainly won’t be hovering UFOs,
but subtle traces of gases in the
atmospheres of distant planets.
Bennett’s book captures the
magnitude of the quest for alien
life, and its incredible implications
for humanity.”
Julius Caesar has
been dead for 2,061
years, but the air he
breathed is still in
circulation
If you wanted to travel back in a time
machine to the Earth’s distant past
and take a deep breath outside, you’d
only be able to go back a few hundred
million years – it’s only very recently in
our planet’s history that there’s been
enough oxygen to sustain us.
How is the air we breathe
changing?
The atmosphere is like a living thing
- it’s constantly evolving. The rates of
carbon dioxide and other greenhouse
gases are increasing, and the air is
more radioactive now because we’re
still dealing with fallout from 1950s
nuclear weapons tests.
We also see a lot more complex,
human-made molecules in the air
today. If aliens were to look at our
planet’s atmosphere, the presence of
these gases would be a good sign that
the Earth harbours life. Likewise, the
next generation of telescopes should
allow us to start looking for these
complicated gases in the atmospheres
of distant exoplanets, helping us
to search for the best candidates for
extraterrestrial life.
I think it’s also inevitable that we’ll find
an exoplanet with a great mix of gases
for us to survive on. The hard part will be
figuring out how to get there.
What other interesting stories did
you uncover about the air?
One of my favourites involves Charles
Dickens. In his 1853 novel Bleak House,
a character called Krook appears to
spontaneously combust, turning into
a pile of ash. At the time, scientists
were beginning to figure out how
breathing works, and they were also
starting to make connections between
burning and the oxygen in air. So some
people thought that if we have a lot of
oxygen in our bodies, maybe we could
spontaneously ignite. It’s possible that
these ideas influenced Dickens, along
with eyewitness accounts. But now, of
course, we know it’s not possible. The
body is up to 75 per cent water, and
even the worst fever doesn’t get us hot
enough to start a fire.