Customer Reviews

Imagining the Universe

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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.