Powers of Ten: A Book About the Relative Size of Things in the Universe and the Effect of Adding Another Zero

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 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 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 show more 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.

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.

A classic! I have used this material (and related YouTube videos) when teaching chemistry for years.

Good condition. Dust jacket shows wear, discoloration, and small tears along edges. Pages clean. Binding tight.

Excellent gift. Mind expanding in the best way!