To continue with a posting trend we started a couple days ago, I wanted to recommend a terrific book called Powers of Ten: About the Relative Size of Things in the Universe [1], by Philip Morrison and Phylis Morrison, originally published in 1982 by scientific American Library. [It appears that new softcover copies of this book are getting harder to come by, though the book is still readily available on the used book market].
The heart of the book is a series of photographs. The first photos capture scenes that are extremely wide (the first captures a field in outer space that is 1,000,000,000 light-years wide). Each successive picture encompasses a scene that is ten times narrower than the previous picture. Eventually, the outer space pictures zero in on the Milky Way galaxy, our solar system and then the planet Earth, coming down for landing on a grassy field in downtown Chicago. The pictures continue to decrease at the rate of the power of ten, as the “camera” drills into the arm of a man lying down on a picnic blanket, exploring his skin cells, cell walls, then his DNA before probing ever further in the subatomic world of particles, then waves.
It makes this entire journey in only 42 pictures.
The book is beautifully photographed and illustrated, accompanied by well-written essays. It is a timeless treasure in my house. According to a comment or on Amazon, “There is no better guide to the relative sizes of things in the universe, and no better teacher about what exponential, scientific notation really means.”
[After writing this, Dan Klarmann sent in the links to videos and websites that give you much of information and many of the photos the book provided. Check out Dan’s comment to this post. For some fun, check out the Simpsons’ [2] version of the Power of Ten.]
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