Volume 1: The Making of the Physical World: A Coat Rack for Knowledge

History... it is not the most respected of disciplines. Now that the bleedingly obvious is out of the way, let me add that it is also one I feel deserves a lot more respect than it usually gets, but not just that: it can also be an invaluable tool in your mental toolkit, one that helps you make sense of... basically everything. Why? Because at the end of the day that is how we organize our thoughts at the most fundamental level: by telling ourselves stories. That is how we make things fit together in our minds, and the history of our world (and in this case I mean in the most literal sense of the word) is no exception. That is why I often think of history as a coat rack for knowledge, as a weird contraption we can hang all those messy bits from, which is where the title of this series actually comes from.

This series will feature three volumes. This is obviously the first one, and no matter what those volume numbers tell you, you should probably start here (depending on when you read this, there may well be a 'volume 0' that is available, you should still probably start here, it's just that there was one chapter in this volume that threatened to get a little out of hand, so it got expanded), though truth be told, except for a few stray references here and there, those three volumes are effectively independent from one another. So what is this thing, and especially this volume, all about?

This is a book about the history of our world. Note that I said the history of our world, not the history of our kind, as it is actually a story of how everything we see around us came to be, from the Big Bang, to the formation of the earth, to the emergence of life (and our understanding of the blasted thing), finishing with the bursting into the scene of our own species (volume two, on the other hand, will deal with the history of our species, while volume zero will tackle the question of how was it that the universe came to be).

Now, the first thing you have to keep in mind when it comes to that one is that this is a book that is meant to be read, not studied (what can I say? I love to learn, but I'm not too fond of studying). It is also one that does not go into any great detail regarding any particular subject, but instead what it does is bring together a whole bunch of disparate disciplines that wouldn't usually be caught dead together, and attempts to weave them into a single, coherent narrative, into a single story, one that can actually fit between our ears, because at the end of the day reality is one, and while I understand the need for specialization, that emphasis on specialization can cause us to miss the forest for the trees.

That is, in fact, one of my pet peeves: the fact that schools seem to jump to stage two, and bypass stage one altogether. That we study the different sciences and the difference disciplines separately from the get-go, that we go into too much detail right from the start without even trying to get a glimpse of the big picture, and that is what history can bring to the table.

It is not a minor thing.