Seeing Further: Ideas, Endeavours, Discoveries and Disputes — The Story of Science Through 350 Years of the Royal Society

by Bill Bryson

Symmetry calms me down, lack of symmetry makes me crazy. – Yves Saint Laurent

The Earth is still a beautiful ball floating in space. The Apollo 17 camera did not lie. But by seeming to show everything, that portrait made it too easy to ignore the dynamism its stillness could not show. The Earth is not something put before us, or left behind us. It is around us and within us, turning on itself in every way it can as energy flows through it from the depths of the past and the fires of the Sun. It is not just a spaceship carrying a crew. It is a world, and now aware.