What you will

See for Yourself Planetary Habitability

A Modern Fortnight of the First

New Science of the Renaissance

Norman H. Sleep

COPYRIGHT NOTICE

These materials are works protected by the Copyright Laws of the United States and international treaties and are displayed solely for use by students of GP25 or Humbio 107 in connection with their course work at Stanford University.

These materials may not be copied, displayed, distributed or used to make derivative works without the express written consent of the copyright owner. Any person wishing to copy or use these material for any purpose should make request in writing to Dr. Norman Sleep, Department of Geophysics, Stanford University. norm@pangea.stanford.edu.

This webbook is a work in progress. I continually update it. I have not touched the files.pdf since September 2005. I periodically check the weblinks. They are more useful than library citations for most of us.

As you can see, I have organized the book into days and made allusions to Shakespeare to establish an aura of the late Renaissance. Originally, Renaissance meant rebrith, the driven attempt to recover the lost knowledge of Antiquity. In the late Renaissance, the learned veered from exhuming knowledge to extending it with their own observations. I follow the path of Astrobiology from its troubled beginning as the first new science to its place in our high-tech world.

The web book is accessible to those without scientific training. It is for anyone with an interest in basic questions like the origin of life and whether life exists elsewhere in the universe. I am glad to live in a time of history where I have been able to productively address these topics as a working scientist. I address the history of science from that viewpoint.

I am putting birth and death dates on the first significant mention of all persons to maintain historical context. I use the well known form of names, even where it violates proper naming practice like with Da Vinci. I give alternative forms where confusion may result, like with Simplicio in Italian and Simplicius in Latin. My intent is to aid web searches by the historically minded readers.

Prologue | As You Like It?

Day 1 | A Tale Told by an Idiot

Day 2 | Lots of Space

Day 3 | The New Math and Some Physics

Day 4 | Interlude and Update: Science and Imagination

Day 5 | So Much Time, So Little Time

Day 6 | Inconstant Stars

Day 7 | A Clement Climate

Day 8 | A Churning Planet

Day 9 | Real Correlations and False Coincidences

Day 10 | Living at Ground Zero

Day 11 | Dark Abodes for Life

Day 12 | Love and War

Day 13 | Mother Earth

Day 14 | Little Green Men

Epilogue: Science and Data in Practice

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