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.

加布裏埃爾·沃剋（Gabrielle Walker），是一位極富天纔、多次獲奬的科學作傢，已經齣版瞭四部科普作品。她是劍橋大學的化學博士，在BBC的多檔新聞熱點節目中擔任嘉賓主持人，並擔任《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科學紀錄片的策劃人和片中解說人。她還是劍橋大學和普林斯頓大學的客座教員，也是《自然》雜誌和《新科學傢》雜誌的特邀編輯。她居住在倫敦。