Discipline
History
Lessons across the journey that lean on history, in the order they appear in the story.
- 1.5 How we knowDraft
The three pillars of evidence for the Big Bang, and how each one could have proved it wrong.
- 2.5 Reading starlightDraft
Spectra, distances and the cosmic distance ladder: how we measure things we can never visit.
- 2.7 One chart for every starDraft
The Hertzsprung–Russell diagram, which organises every star by brightness and temperature.
- 3.3 The periodic table as a history bookDraft
Every element has an origin story; the periodic table arranged by where each one was made.
- 4.6 Deep timeDraft
Radiometric dating: how we know the age of a rock.
- 5.3 Evolution by natural selectionDraft
The one mechanism that turns chemistry into everything else.
- 6.4 Language and symbolic thoughtDraft
The one thing that leaves no fossils, and how we look for it anyway.
- 6.5 Collective learningDraft
The threshold: why a species that forgets nothing beats a species that thinks faster.
- 6.6 Out of Africa, into IndiaDraft
How our species spread across the world, and what the genetics of the subcontinent actually show.
- 6.7 Foraging lifewaysDraft
How people lived for ninety-five percent of human history, and why we keep getting it wrong.
- 7.1 Why farm?Draft
The worst decision anyone ever made, taken independently at least eleven times.
- 7.3 Villages to citiesDraft
How a pile of grain becomes a temple, a scribe, a tax and a king.
- 7.4 The Indus Valley civilisationDraft
The largest of the ancient civilisations by area, with no palaces, no royal tombs, and a script nobody can read.
- 7.5 The price of farmingDraft
The bill for cities: disease, inequality, patriarchy, slavery and soil.
- 7.6 Empires and exchangeDraft
Why agrarian states kept growing, kept collapsing, and kept connecting.
- 8.1 The Columbian ExchangeDraft
Two worlds meet, and the deadliest thing that crosses is invisible.
- 8.2 The Scientific RevolutionDraft
Not a discovery but a method, and not invented anywhere in particular.
- 8.3 Fossil Fuels and IndustryDraft
Digging up three hundred million years of sunlight, and what it did to everyone who did not.
- 8.4 The Great AccelerationDraft
Twenty-four graphs that all bend at the same moment, and what that moment cost.
- 8.5 The AnthropoceneDraft
A proposed geological epoch that was formally rejected in 2024, and why that rejection changes nothing about the evidence.
- 9.3 Machines that learnDraft
Chapter 6 said collective learning made us. This lesson asks, carefully, whether this counts.
- 9.4 Editing lifeDraft
The first CRISPR cure works. It treats a disease concentrated in the places least able to pay for it.