Our Concept of the Earth

Lapo Boschi is an associate professor of geophysics at the University of Padua, Italy; his research (H-index=32 according to SCOPUS, over 100 publications on international peer-reviewed journals) covers a variety of different, but not unrelated topics, from tectonics and seismic tomography, to the auditory display of scientific data, to bioacoustics. He received his bachelor's and Ph.D. degrees from Bologna and Harvard University, respectively. Besides Padua, he has taught geophysics and wave physics at the University of Naples, ETH Zurich (2004-2012), Pierre and Marie Curie/Sorbonne University (2012-2018), ICTP Trieste. At Sorbonne, he has taught courses about the history of ideas in the geosciences and about multidisciplinary science, which contributed to inspiring this book project. He has long been interested in communicating advanced science to (relatively) wide audiences.

The mass of the earth.- The structure of the earth: rotation, precession, cosmogony.- The forces that shape the earth: Neptunism vs. Plutonism.- The age of the earth.- The forces that shape the earth: shrinking, isostasy, drift.- The structure of the earth: seismology.- The forces that shape the earth: convection and plates.- Our concept of the earth.- Exercises: Further Food for Thought.