A bit too "popular" in tone -- what a waste all the white space on the page is! It's not as though there aren't things to say. The Morrisons underestimate their audience. ( )

Every time you turn a page, the photo zooms in by a factor of 10. The first page shows a billion light years of the universe, then 100 million light years, etc. It takes only 42 page turns until you reach the smallest scale photo--depicting the distance between two quarks. ( )

Simply one of the best science books ever written. Its core is a series of 42 full page images, each representing a ten-fold zoom into the centre of its predecessor, spanning the Universe from a scale of 1 billion light years to the distance between two quarks. In the 25 years since its publication we could reasonably extend the spatial scale of the first image to 10 billion light years, but have made only highly speculative progress in understanding the sub-nuclear scale.

The book gains additional strength from the extended essay which precedes the journey from cosmos to quark, and the erudite captions which accompany each step. The Morrison's writing is also a treat: elegant, spare, graceful, and eloquent. If I were able to keep only ten books from my library, this would be one of them.

FROM BOOK COVER:
In 'Powers of Ten' forty-two remarkable vistas present the universe, in measured steps, as we now know it... From the largest known dimension (10 to the power of 25 meters) to its smalles (10 to the power of negative 16 meters)... ( )

Cool site: http://www.powersof10.com/

What's cool about it: Look for links that say "Other sites that explore this scale."
(John) ( )