A comprehensive explanation of the human body and the galaxy enables readers to visualize difficult-to-perceive concepts, defines confusing terms, and chronicles time from the ""Big Bang"" to the end of the universe.
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Concepts about time, space, and the workings of the universe are exceedingly difficult to grasp. For many readers, mathematics does little to dispel confusion, so Packard has put together a series of visual images to illustrate the relationship between outer space and microspace, light-years and micrometers. Using comparisons, a very basic form of relativity, and clever drawings and diagrams, Packard helps us visualize the immensity of space by picturing the earth shrunk to the size of a baseball park so that he can lay out the center of the solar system on a global map, making the distances between planets more comprehensible. The sun is reduced to a grain of sand, and so on, until we have some frame of reference for imagining the vastness of the universe. Then Packard goes in the opposite direction and expands a baseball to the size of the earth so that molecules are visible; to make atoms visible, he pictures a baseball large enough to reach from the earth to the moon. This rather elegant pictorial method works just as well when Packard creates time lines that equate time and distance on different scales. Donna Seaman
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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Elegant Graphics but Book Needs More Numbers,
By A Customer
This review is from: Imagining the Universe (Paperback)
This book uses elegant graphic comparisons to help the reader visualise the immensity of space, deep time, and the microscopic world. The Earth, for example, is imagined to be the size of a baseball with the Sun hovering about three-quarters of a mile away. The problem is that the author is so determined to use visual comparisons to help readers comprehend astronomical, and microscopic distances that he, for the most part, dispenses with actual measurements of sizes and distances. This was made doubly frustrating to this reader who was not familiar with San Francisco, baseball (two comparisons Packard uses extensively) or the imperial system. I would have liked to have had more figures to construct my own reference systems. This book is an excellent idea; if it is ever republished I would like to see more numbers, perhaps in the form of tables, as an appendix, or printed on the illustrations in tiny type so as not to scare the numeral-phobic. The booklet "The Thousand Yard Model: or Earth as a Peppercorn" uses visual comparisons but also gives the actual distances and their scaled equivalents. Someone should do the same for deep time and microscopic distances.
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