THE BOOK: Beautifully illustrated, featuring a selection of the best questions posed by the curios including 'Does my dog love me?' and 'Can we grow a brain?'
COMPS: Why Does E=MC2? (HB:13.3K PB:180K),
QI: The Book of General Ignorance (HB: 439K),
The Book of the Year (No Such Thing As a Fish) 2017 (HB: 35K)
THE CAMPAIGN: We will launch a creative, multi-faceted digital campaign sharing some of the curious questions from the book, reaching out to fans of the show through both visual and audio creatives.
THE AUTHORS: Dr Hannah Fry is an award-winning mathematician and author of
Hello World (TCM: 11.5K), shortlisted for the Royal Society Book Prize and Baillie Gifford Prize. Her talks, and regular science broadcasting bring in huge audiences across the world. Dr Adam Rutherford is also an award-winning geneticist, author and broadcaster. His latest book,
How to Argue with a Racist, recently debuted at #6 in the ST Bestseller list. Together they present
The Curious Cases of Rutherford and Fry on BBC Radio 4.
DR HANNAH FRY: Award-winning mathematician and author.
Hello World (TCM: 11.5K) shortlisted for Royal Society Book Prize 2018 and the 2018 Baillie Gifford Prize. Regular presence in science broadcasting and her Ted Talk has nearly 600K views on YouTube. Talks draw in audiences of over one thousand around the world.
DR ADAM RUTHERFORD: Award winning geneticist, writer and broadcaster. Previous books
Creation (TCM: 8K)
The Book of Humans (TCM: 5K) and
A Brief History of Everyone Who Ever Lived (TCM: 52.5K). Constant presence across radio and television broadcasting. Talks draw in audiences of over one thousand around the world.
THE SHOW: Prime-time weekly Radio 4 show has over 3 million engaged listeners. It is part of BBC sounds and its trails are featured on flagship shows such as
Desert Island Discs and
Friday Night Comedy. 1.4K five-star ratings on Podcast app and 400K downloads per monthA wonderfully engaging blend of wit, enthusiasm, clarity and knowledge.The illustrations are truly excellent.Like the universe itself, this book is multi-faceted, surprising and full of wonders. It's also funny, wise and exceedingly brainy. You really owe it to yourself to read it.If only Adam Rutherford and Hannah Fry were on tap to all of us, all the time: we could turn to them whenever we wanted delicious explanations, narratives and theories to make sense of the material world. But we do have this deeply addictive book as a companion. The pair have such a gift for making life, numbers and the forces at work in the universe all the richer, stranger, funnier and more marvellous.Explores just about every area of life.
THE SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER
'Explores just about every area of life' DAILY MAIL
'If only Adam Rutherford and Hannah Fry were on tap to all of us, all the time . . . The pair have such a gift for making life, numbers and the forces at work in the universe all the richer, stranger, funnier and more marvellous.' Stephen Fry
In Rutherford and Fry's comprehensive guidebook, they tell the complete story of the universe and absolutely everything in it - skipping over some of the boring parts.
This is a celebration of the weirdness of the cosmos, the strangeness of humans and the fact that amid all the mess, we can somehow make sense of life.
Our brains have evolved to tell us all sorts of things that feel intuitively right but just aren't true: the world looks flat, the stars seem fixed in the heavenly firmament, a day is 24 hours... This book is crammed full of tales of how stuff really works. With the power of science, Rutherford and Fry show us how to bypass our monkey-brains, taking us on a journey from the origin of time and space, via planets, galaxies, evolution, the dinosaurs, all the way into our minds, and wrestling with some truly head-scratching questions that only science can answer:
What is time, and where does it come from?
Why are animals the size and shape they are?
How horoscopes work (Spoiler: they don't, but you think they do)
Does my dog love me?
Why nothing is truly round?
Do you need your eyes to see?
'A wonderfully engaging blend of wit, enthusiasm, clarity and knowledge.' Bill Bryson
'Like the universe itself, this book is multi-faceted, surprising and full of wonders. It's also funny, wise and exceedingly brainy. You really owe it to yourself to read it.' Tim Harford, author of How To Make The World Add Up
