Big Ideas

Big Ideas: A Guide to the History of Everything narrates the history of the universe, Earth, life, and humanity while analyzing how grand stories about the past, present, and future are crafted and framed.

In Big Ideas, authors Cameron Gibelyou and Douglas Northrop create a novel framework for thinking about the history and future of everything. They grapple throughout the book with issues at the intersection of the natural sciences, history, literature, philosophy, religion, and the humanities. In
nine elegantly written chapters, they attempt to make a reasoned analysis of worldviews that underlie historical writing across many fields. Throughout the course of their broad and deep explorations, the authors bring a wide range of voices to bear on fascinating questions of where everything--from
the universe as a whole to any particular thing within it--came from, how it got to be the way it is today, and where things might be headed in the future.

Big Ideas invites readers to think about genuinely big questions carefully and rigorously, separating received narratives about the "history of everything" from the basic facts discovered by scientific and historical study. The book treats scientific explanation and humanistic interpretation as
partners: inviting those with primarily scientific interests into a humanistic discussion about science and history, and encouraging those with core interests in the humanities into a discussion of how humanities-based ways of thinking might connect with and apply to the natural sciences. This
engagement helps readers learn a basic narrative of the "history of everything" while constantly provoking thought about big questions and the field of Big History.

"A higher education history textbook that covers the history of the universe, Earth, life, and humanity as a single unified whole, integrating knowledge from across the natural sciences, social sciences, and humanities"--

"How do you write histories of all of time? How do you handle Time itself, or the moment of Creation? Or Evolution, or Causation and Contingency, or the spooky power of mathematical reasoning? And what is Entropy? In nine beautifully written chapters, Cameron Gibelyou and Douglas Northrop explore
the perils and delights of writing, reading, and interpreting Big History."--David Christian, author of Maps of Time: An Introduction to Big History

"Racing from the Big Bang to the present can make for a jarring ride, rocketing readers across enormous differences of evidence and idiom. But Northrop and Gibelyou positively delight in these disciplinary leaps. Rather than smoothing over the gaps, Big Ideas makes them integral to the story,
exploring how each jump in scale plunges us into a new scholarly community with its own history and habits. In the process, the authors shed as much light on the evolution of the university as of the universe--and turn Big History into a lively forum for integrating cross-disciplinary knowledge. A
game-changing contribution."--K�ren Wigen, Stanford University

"This is an important book that should be read by people in every discipline. It is a thoughtful and insightful examination about our ideas of how we originated, where we come from, how we got here, what our conditions mean now, and where we may be headed. Written by a historian and an
astrophysicist, it integrates ideas about the sciences and the humanities and seeks the unity that universities should be seeking. From physics to philosophy and from chemistry to cultural studies, this book contributes significantly to our ideas about what it means to be an educated person in our
time."--Lowell Gustafson, Villanova University

"In this important book, Cameron Gibelyou and Douglas Northrop offer a conversation among different approaches to understanding the major ideas that we use or take for granted in everyday life and in scholarly fields. In both big and little ways, they examine knowledge from across different
disciplines, answering questions and raising new ones. In each chapter, they invite readers to look behind the curtains and to join in the discussion."--Bob Bain, University of Michigan