- A flamboyant Renaissance Italian discovers how heavy our air really is: The air filling Carnegie Hall, for example, weighs seventy thousand pounds.

- A one-eyed barnstorming pilot finds a set of winds that constantly blow five miles above our heads.

- An impoverished American farmer figures out why hurricanes move in a circle by carving equations with his pitchfork on a barn door.

- A well-meaning inventor nearly destroys the ozone layer.

- A reclusive mathematical genius predicts, thirty years before he's proved right, that the sky contains a layer of floating metal fed by the glowing tails of shooting stars.