About the Author
Robert W. Jansen is a physicist and engineer whose research has spanned semiconductor materials, ocean mechanics, Earth imaging, and advanced radar systems. He has spent a career in science not as an observer of it but as a practitioner — building things that work because the underlying physics is correct, and occasionally discovering that it is not.
That practitioner's habit — following a chain of physical reasoning until it produces something that actually works — is what he brings to his writing as well. Whether the subject is the deep history of the Earth, a vanished civilization, or a child's first encounter with the prehistoric world, the aim is the same:
to tell true stories carefully, in language that respects both the evidence and the reader.
He is the author of thirteen books. His historical fiction includes The Tenochtitlan Chronicles, tracing two hundred years of Aztec civilization through three young scribes, and The Rapa Nui Chronicles, following eight centuries of life on Easter Island. For younger readers, Lucy: A Life in the Dawn of Time imagines the life of an Australopithecus afarensis ancestor, and Kiko: A Watcher's Journey follows a boy across the last Ice Age. The Stone That Remembers is a novel for adult readers set in ancient Egypt.
The Illusion of Design and The Restless Planet are companion volumes, written together and published the same year. The first examines how scientific reasoning works and why it persuades — and grew from a long-running frustration with arguments that dress intuition in scientific language while ignoring the method that makes science powerful. The second tells the 13.8-billion-year story that method has produced: from the Big Bang through the formation of the Earth to the present. Neither book is written to win an argument. Both are written to explain, as clearly and honestly as possible, what the method is, what it has found, and why the findings are more wonderful than any alternative.