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Fourth Estate
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www.4thestate.co.uk
First published in Great Britain by Fourth Estate in 2014
Copyright Christopher Potter 2014
Christopher Potter asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
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Source ISBN: 9780007447794
Ebook Edition MARCH 2014 ISBN: 9780007447800
Version: 2015-02-02
You Are Here: A Portable History of the Universe
I cannot be forever footnoting my conversation as if I were reading an academic paper. It would be a way, I suppose, of trying to ringfence what is authentically me. But since most of the time I dont know where my ideas come from, and even where my ideas seem more authentic to me they may be things I heard years before, read years before, overheard on a bus and didnt know except perhaps at the time that they had gone in deeply, I am quite happy to accept myself as the agglomeration of everything I have read, heard or attended or not attended to. I dont know where I begin and end, and Im happy that way. Long may it continue, though I cannot help but suspect that death will draw me up short as it were. Even then, it will be evidence for the everything that I was in living to the everything that is left by my death, that I was that shape after all, and no other.
Ford Madox Ford, Parades End
J.R. Ackerley, Hindoo Holiday, 1932 rev 1952, Penguin Modern Classics 2009
Bryan Appleyard, Aliens: Why They Are Here, Scribner 2005
Karen Armstrong, The Case for God: What Religion Really Means, Bodley Head 2009
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W.H. Auden, Collected Poems, ed. Edward Mendelson, Faber 2004
Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, trs Robin Hard, Oxford World Classics 2011
Julian Baggini, Atheism: A Very Short Introduction, Oxford 2003
W.N.P. Barbellion, The Journal of a Disappointed Man, 1919
W.N.P. Barbellion, A Last Diary, 1920
Julian Barbour, The End of Time: The Next Revolution in our Understanding of the Universe, Oxford 1999
Jonathan Barnes, Early Greek Philosophy, Penguin 1987, revised 2001
John D. Barrow, The Constants of Nature, Cape 2002
John D. Barrow, The Book of Universes, Bodley Head 2011
Giorgio Bassani, The Garden of the Finzi-Continis, 1962, trs Jamie McKendrick, Penguin Modern Classics 2007
Sharon Begley, The Plastic Mind: New Science Reveals Our Extraordinary Potential to Transform Ourselves, Ballantine 2007
Alex Bellos, Alexs Adventures in Numberland: Dispatches From the Wonderful World of Mathematics, Bloomsbury 2010
Erick Beltrain, The World Explained: A Microhistorical Encyclopaedia, Roma 2012
John Berger with Jean Mohr, A Fortunate Man, Readers Union 1967
Tim Birkhead, Bird Sense: What its Like to be a Bird, Bloomsbury 2012
Susan Blackmore, Conversations on Consciousness: What the Best Minds Think About the Brain, Free Will, and What it Means to be Human, Oxford 2006
David Bodanis, Electric Universe: How Electricity Switched on the Modern World, Little, Brown 2005
David Bohm, Wholeness and the Implicate Order, Routledge 2002
Jill Bolte Taylor, My Stroke of Insight: A Brain Surgeons Personal Journey, Penguin 2006
James Boswell, The Life of Samuel Johnson, 1791, Penguin 2008
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Sir Thomas Browne, Urn Burial, 1658
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Jean-Marie Chauvet, Eliotte Brunel Deschamps, and Christian Hillaire, Chauvet Cave: The Discovery of the Worlds Oldest Paintings, new edn Thames and Hudson 2001
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Brian Clegg, A Brief History of Infinity: The Quest to Think the Unthinkable, Constable 2003
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J.M. Coetzee and others, The Lives of Animals, Princeton 1999
Edward Conze trs., Buddhist Wisdom: The Diamond Sutra and the Heart Sutra, Vintage 2001
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Francis Crick, The Astonishing Hypothesis: The Scientific Search for the Soul, Scribner 1994
Dalai Lama, The, The Universe in a Single Atom, Morgan Road Books 2005
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Antonio Damasio, Self Comes to Mind: Constructing the Conscious Brain, Pantheon 2010
Charles Darwin, The Voyage of the Beagle, 1839
Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species, 1859
Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man, 1871
Darwins correspondence can be found online at www.darwinproject.ac.uk
Manuel Davenport, The Mystery of Morality, 1994
James Davidson, The Greeks and Greek Love: A Radical Reappraisal of Homosexuality in Ancient Greece, Weidenfeld 2007
Paul Davies, Space and Time in the Modern Universe, Cambridge 1977
Paul Davies, God and the New Physics, Oxford 1976
Paul Davies, Other Worlds: Space, Superspace and the Quantum Universe, Dent 1980
Paul Davies, The Eerie Silence: Are We Alone in the Universe?, Allen Lane 2010
Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene, Oxford 1976
Richard Dawkins, The Blind Watchmaker, Longman 1986
Richard Dawkins, River Out of Eden, Weidenfeld and Nicolson 1995
Richard Dawkins, Climbing Mount Improbable, Viking 1996
Richard Dawkins, Unweaving the Rainbow
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