The Path: A One-Mile Walk Through the Universe

"Yes, it’s a similar premise. Again, it’s by a scientist—he’s a physicist—and it’s about the one-mile commute that he’s done every day for decades. What he does on this walk is to just to slow down and be interested in it. And because he’s a physicist, he comes at things from the space point of view. So he picks up a pebble and realizes, ‘Oh, this pebble was once part of a huge mountain, which was once an asteroid flying through space.’ It’s about the hugeness that you can find in a pebble—it’s that line of William Blake’s “To see a World in a Grain of Sand.” He talks about all sorts of things–from black holes to bluebirds. Again, it was a really good way of teaching me about stuff I know nothing about in a way that in a normal science book, I might have found a bit dry and boring."