Book of the Week: from the birth of the universe to the present day for 18 minutes

Doctor of History combines liberal arts and sciences, to study the past and predict the future.

An expert on Russia and the Soviet Union, David Christian has spent a lot of time to obtain a doctoral degree. He then went on to teach their subject, but quickly realized that it's not quite right to present the story to the students. The division of the world in the country and the nation created dissonance, because he believed that the need to study the whole of humanity at once, rather than its individual parts.

Such an integrated approach and suggested the involvement of a larger number of disciplines: biology, physics, and cosmology. This unusual view of science interested in Bill Gates, who saw in the work of Christian reasonable grain. Since then began their cooperation, which resulted in an educational project Big History Project ( "The Big Story").

The main objective was not only to lay down their history in a single picture, but also to make it so that it became clear to everyone, not just academics. How successfully did it the author shows his speech at the TED conference. Record speech Professor "The history of our world in 18 minutes" watched over 4.5 million times.

success repeated lectures and the book "The Big Story". It begins with a section dedicated to the cosmos and the biosphere, because they were the source of all. But Christian moves quickly to what is most interesting to the reader - to a man. Section of the people is called - "We". It begins with the evolution passes through agriculture and agrarian structure of society, stops on the Middle Ages and suited to the modern world in which science and technology have made an incredible leap in just a few centuries.

But this book does not end there, because the story continues. Professor makes assumptions about the future: where will roll development that will make a person and whether there is something beyond. Time will tell how Christian was right.

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