Philip Morrison (1915–2005)

This is the greatest science book ever made. It is better than its accompanying video. The book is so concise, yet it includes so much richness, so much research, and so much visual information. Symbolic representation of science is a necessity, but nothing brings it all together like this book. It's an exponential journey through space, connecting the Milky Way to the Carbon-12 atom of DNA of a cell in the hand of a person, a citizen. Copernicus would've wept.

For a museum experience of show more these ideas, the Hayden Planetarium provides a similar adventure into size and scale.

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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 show more 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. show less

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.

Easy to understand exploration of how we know the things we know. How have we come to understand the world around us. Full of illustrations, and stories.