Matter, earth, and sky
George Gamow
Prentice-Hall
The plan selected for this book is that of a trilogy dealing first with things our size, secondly with things much
smaller, and finally with things much larger than ourselves.

In the first part the reader will find a discussion of phenomena that are more or less familiar to him from his
everyday experience: the motion of the pendulum in a
grandfather's clock, the boiling of water in a teakettle,
rainbows in the sky, the electric current in a telephone
wire, etc. This is the field of so-called "classical physics,"
which is not very exciting and challenging for our imagination but is absolutely necessary for an understanding of
the events that take place in the physical world to which
we belong.

In the second part, the reader will be taken into the
wonderful world of modern physics and chemistry. Down will he go
through the crowds of molecules that restlessly rush about without any
order in gases and that form most unusual architectural structures in
crystals. He will meet the atoms and learn how they stick together to
make different chemical substances, from such simple ones as table salt
to such complex, and still to a large extent mysterious, ones as proteins.
He will enter the interior structure of the atom with its swarms of unruly
electrons, and finally the atomic nucleus itself. He will become acquainted
with newly discovered particles with such strange names as "muons,"
"pious." and "hvperons," some of which may well be the ultimate building blocks of matter.

Leaving this microcosmic world, the reader will now be taken into
the world of things that are much larger than himself. He will see the
interior structure of our globe, the depths of the ocean, and the outer
fringes of the atmosphere. He will get acquainted with the planets of
the solar system, the sun, the stars, and the giant stellar systems known
as galaxies. And at the end he will learn about the history of the universe,
about the origin of the earth, stars, and galaxies, and also about the
origin of the tiny atoms of the various chemical elements of which our
universe is made.