you will find many remarkable details about what it is that makes up you, a human being. Who wouldn't be amazed to find out, for example, that:
- We don't actually hear with two ears, but with six. Not only does this help us orientate ourselves in space, it's why we can pay attention to just one conversation in a room full of people talking at once.
- The optic nerve, the 'information connection' from the eye to the brain, is only 2 mm thick, but contains more than one million nerve fibers, all insulated from each other. Even in our modern age of glass fiber connections, communications engineers can only dream of having a 'cable' with such high-tech capacities.
- We can normally distinguish between around 10,000 various smells, but even this remarkable ability can be greatly enhanced with practice, as in the case of professional wine and coffee tasters.
- Your heart beats 100,00 times in a day, and pumps enough blood in your lifetime to fill a huge skyscraper. In every drop of your blood there are 250 million red blood cells; the number of these cells in all the blood in your body is an unimaginable 250,000,000,000,000!
- Our brain consists of around 100 billion nerve cells, around the same order of magnitude as the number of stars in our Milky Way galaxy. The length of the nerve fibers in the cerebrum alone, laid end to end, would reach much further than the distance from the earth to the moon.
The above small sample gives a glimpse of the many unique features of our design and construction. These are expounded in detail in this book, making its title The Wonder of Man particularly appropriate.
Having given many amazing medical, physical, chemical and information-theoretical details of the way we are made, the author does not, however, leave it at that, but draws logical conclusions from these about the Originator of mankind. He concerns himself with the question of how we stand in our Creator's sight, and what our destiny is. The aspect of our having been made for eternity is dealt with in appropriate depth.
This book is not aimed at any special group of readers, but at everyone capable of fascination and wonder, and interested in the discovery of new things. Thus both lay and specialist/technical readers will find themselves catered for within these pages.