Meteor: An Essay on Floating

In the beginning was the gaze into the heavens. “Meteor” describes in ancient Greek a wide range of floating objects: atmospheric phenomena like clouds and the climate as well as the paths and passages of the stars. But flux and fugitivity extend beyond the study of clouds. Joseph Vogl’s brilliant book explores scenes of levitation, unweighting, and evanescence from literature to philosophy and natural science, in which the heaviness of the world is lifted and new fields of possibility are set free.