We spend our lives surrounded by air, hardly even noticing it. It's the most miraculous substance on earth, yet responsible for our food, our weather, our water, and our ability to hear. In fact, we live at the bottom of an ocean of air. In this exuberant book, gifted science writer Gabrielle Walker peels back the layers of our atmosphere with the stories of the people who uncovered its secrets: - A flamboyant Renaissance Italian discovers how heavy our air really is: The air filling Carnegie Hall, for example, weighs seventy thousand pounds. - A one-eyed barnstorming pilot finds a set of winds that constantly blow five miles above our heads.- An impoverished American farmer figures out why hurricanes move in a circle by carving equations with his pitchfork on a barn door. - A well-meaning inventor nearly destroys the ozone layer. - A reclusive mathematical genius predicts, thirty years before he's proved right, that the sky contains a layer of floating metal fed by the glowing tails of shooting stars.

加布里埃尔·沃克（Gabrielle Walker），是一位极富天才、多次获奖的科学作家，已经出版了四部科普作品。她是剑桥大学的化学博士，在BBC的多档新闻热点节目中担任嘉宾主持人，并担任《冰的秘密生活》（The secret Life of Ice）和《每一次呼吸》（Every Breath We Take）等多部BBC科学纪录片的策划人和片中解说人。她还是剑桥大学和普林斯顿大学的客座教员，也是《自然》杂志和《新科学家》杂志的特邀编辑。她居住在伦敦。