A Wallbook is a large printed book that is designed also to be mounted on a wall. For example, its design may be concertina folded so it can be read like a book or hung on a wall.
The name was coined by Christopher Lloyd (world history author), creator of the 2010 The What on Earth? Wallbook which claims to be the first ever attempt to illustrate the entire history of everything from the Big Bang to the present day on a single timeline.[ dead link ] [1]
Reviewing the book for the Telegraph's Family Book Club, the writer Christopher Middleton encapsulates the work as a "7-foot, six-inch-long chart, which starts out some four billion years ago, with the explosion that triggered the Earth’s birth, and ends just a matter of months ago, with the election of Barack Obama and the financial crisis of 2007–2008". [2]
The What on Earth? Wallbook is notable for its use of a logarithmic timescale. At the beginning of the timeline 1 cm represents the passage of 1 billion years but by the end of the timeline the same space accounts for just five years. A total of 12 changes of scale accounts for how the whole of the past can be graphically represented on a single piece of paper.
The wallbook’s 1,000 pictures and captions are arranged into 12 streams of colours which provide the backdrops along which the major events of natural and human history unfold. The section, "Space, Earth, Sky, Sea, Land and Humanity" accounts for the story of evolution while Asia, the Middle East, Europe, the Americas, Africa and Australasia convey the rise and fall of human civilisations.
At the top of the timeline is a series of globes that start by showing the movement of the world’s continental plates but later chart the rise and fall of major human empires.
The What on Earth? Wallbook was launched exclusively through The Daily Telegraph newspaper on Saturday 4 September 2010. [2]
Since the launch of the What on Earth? Wallbook the word wallbook has been defined in Macmillan's Open Dictionary as a new noun meaning: "a large printed book which can be mounted on a wall". [3]
Earth is the third planet from the Sun and the only astronomical object known to harbor life. This is enabled by Earth being a water world, the only one in the Solar System sustaining liquid surface water. Almost all of Earth's water is contained in its global ocean, covering 70.8% of Earth's crust. The remaining 29.2% of Earth's crust is land, most of which is located in the form of continental landmasses within one hemisphere, Earth's land hemisphere. Most of Earth's land is somewhat humid and covered by vegetation, while large sheets of ice at Earth's polar deserts retain more water than Earth's groundwater, lakes, rivers and atmospheric water combined. Earth's crust consists of slowly moving tectonic plates, which interact to produce mountain ranges, volcanoes, and earthquakes. Earth has a liquid outer core that generates a magnetosphere capable of deflecting most of the destructive solar winds and cosmic radiation.
The Moon is Earth's only natural satellite. It orbits at an average distance of 384400 km, about 30 times the planet's diameter. The Moon always presents the same side to Earth, because gravitational pull has locked its rotation to the planet. This results in the lunar day of 29.5 days matching the lunar month. The Moon's gravitational pull – and to a lesser extent the Sun's – are the main drivers of the tides.
Nature, in the broadest sense, is the physical world or universe. "Nature" can refer to the phenomena of the physical world, and also to life in general. The study of nature is a large, if not the only, part of science. Although humans are part of nature, human activity is often understood as a separate category from other natural phenomena.
The Omphalos hypothesis is one attempt to reconcile the scientific evidence that the Earth is billions of years old with a literal interpretation of the Genesis creation narrative, which implies that the Earth is only a few thousand years old. It is based on the religious belief that the universe was created by a divine being, within the past six to ten thousand years, and that the presence of objective, verifiable evidence that the universe is older than approximately ten millennia is due to the creator introducing false evidence that makes the universe appear significantly older.
Space exploration is the use of astronomy and space technology to explore outer space. While the exploration of space is currently carried out mainly by astronomers with telescopes, its physical exploration is conducted both by uncrewed robotic space probes and human spaceflight. Space exploration, like its classical form astronomy, is one of the main sources for space science.
A timeline is a display of a list of events in chronological order. It is typically a graphic design showing a long bar labelled with dates paralleling it, and usually contemporaneous events.
The Proterozoic is the third of the four geologic eons of Earth's history, spanning the time interval from 2500 to 538.8 Mya, the longest eon of the Earth's geologic time scale. It is preceded by the Archean and followed by the Phanerozoic, and is the most recent part of the Precambrian "supereon".
A prequel is a literary, dramatic or cinematic work whose story precedes that of a previous work, by focusing on events that occur before the original narrative. A prequel is a work that forms part of a backstory to the preceding work.
In geology, catastrophism is the theory that the Earth has largely been shaped by sudden, short-lived, violent events, possibly worldwide in scope. This contrasts with uniformitarianism, according to which slow incremental changes, such as erosion, brought about all the Earth's geological features. The proponents of uniformitarianism held that the present was "the key to the past", and that all geological processes throughout the past resembled those that can be observed today. Since the 19th-century disputes between catastrophists and uniformitarians, a more inclusive and integrated view of geologic events has developed, in which the scientific consensus accepts that some catastrophic events occurred in the geologic past, but regards these as explicable as extreme examples of natural processes which can occur.
Outer space, commonly referred to simply as space, is the expanse that exists beyond Earth and its atmosphere and between celestial bodies. Outer space is not completely empty; it is a near-perfect vacuum containing a low density of particles, predominantly a plasma of hydrogen and helium as well as electromagnetic radiation, magnetic fields, neutrinos, dust, and cosmic rays. The baseline temperature of outer space, as set by the background radiation from the Big Bang, is 2.7 kelvins.
Spacelab was a reusable laboratory developed by European Space Agency (ESA) and used on certain spaceflights flown by the Space Shuttle. The laboratory comprised multiple components, including a pressurized module, an unpressurized carrier, and other related hardware housed in the Shuttle's cargo bay. The components were arranged in various configurations to meet the needs of each spaceflight.
The atmosphere of Earth is the layer of gases, known collectively as air, retained by Earth's gravity that surrounds the planet and forms its planetary atmosphere. The atmosphere of Earth creates pressure, absorbs most meteoroids and ultraviolet solar radiation, warms the surface through heat retention, allowing life and liquid water to exist on the Earth's surface, and reduces temperature extremes between day and night.
Old Earth creationism (OEC) is an umbrella of theological views encompassing certain varieties of creationism which may or can include day-age creationism, gap creationism, progressive creationism, and sometimes theistic evolutionism.
KEO is the name of a proposed space time capsule which was to have been launched in 2003 carrying messages from the citizens of present Earth to humanity 50,000 years from now, when it would re-enter Earth's atmosphere. Its name represents the three most frequently used sounds common to the most widely spoken languages today,, , and. Everyone was invited to contribute to the time capsule, and the organizers encouraged everybody to gather messages from children, senior citizens, and the illiterate so that every culture and demographic on Earth was represented. Moreover, the organizers were committed to not filtering the messages, stating "all the messages received, without undergoing any censorship, will be embarked aboard KEO." The launch has been delayed several times due to major geopolitical shakeups, including 9/11 and the restructuring of the ESA. As of 1 January 2021, no launch date has been confirmed.
This article discusses the fictional timeline of the Star Trek franchise. The franchise is primarily set in the future, ranging from the mid-22nd century to the late 24th century, with the third season of Star Trek: Discovery jumping forward to the 32nd century. However the franchise has also outlined a fictional future history of Earth prior to this, and, primarily through time travel plots, explored both past and further-future settings.
Christopher John Penrice Booker was an English journalist and author. He was a founder and first editor of the satirical magazine Private Eye in 1961. From 1990 onward he was a columnist for The Sunday Telegraph. In 2009, he published The Real Global Warming Disaster. He also disputed the link between passive smoking and cancer, and the dangers posed by asbestos. In his Sunday Telegraph section he frequently commented on the UK Family Courts and Social Services.
Big History is an academic discipline which examines history from the Big Bang to the present. Big History resists specialization, and searches for universal patterns or trends. It examines long time frames using a multidisciplinary approach based on combining numerous disciplines from science and the humanities, and explores human existence in the context of this bigger picture. It integrates studies of the cosmos, Earth, life, and humanity using empirical evidence to explore cause-and-effect relations, and is taught at universities and primary and secondary schools often using web-based interactive presentations.
The Cosmic Calendar is a method to visualize the chronology of the universe, scaling its currently understood age of 13.8 billion years to a single year in order to help intuit it for pedagogical purposes in science education or popular science.
The space policy of the Barack Obama administration was announced by U.S. President Barack Obama on April 15, 2010, at a major space policy speech at Kennedy Space Center. He committed to increasing NASA funding by $6 billion over five years and completing the design of a new heavy-lift launch vehicle by 2015 and to begin construction thereafter. He also predicted a U.S.-crewed orbital Mars mission by the mid-2030s, preceded by the Asteroid Redirect Mission by 2025. In response to concerns over job losses, Obama promised a $40 million effort to help Space Coast workers affected by the cancellation of the Space Shuttle program and Constellation program.
Christopher Lloyd is a historian, educationalist and author on big history. He is the author of What on Earth Happened: The Complete Story of the Planet , which has sold 500,000 copies. Lloyd is a advocate of connected learning. In collaboration with Beckenham-based illustrator Andy Forshaw, Lloyd has established a format for telling giant narratives to young people by using illustrative timelines called Wallbooks, which present a broader view of world history and visualise connections between the past and the present day.