Customer Reviews

Powers of Ten (Revised) (Scientific American Library Paperback)

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"Powers of Ten" is one of the most influential science books ever printed. It taught me, and tens of thousands of other children, that a "sense of wonder" is something you can get from science, as well as from science fiction. I found it in a bookstore seven or eight years ago, and was immediately transported back to when I first read it, in my school library, at the age of ten. I was swept off my feet at ten years old, and the book can still sweep me off my feet today.

The original film was potent too; more so in the directness with which it expresses the scale of the world. But the book, with its annotations and additional pictures, has its own power. You can flip back and forth, and take as much time as you want absorbing the incredible range of scale in the universe.

The book's first picture is scaled at about a billion light years across--ten to the twenty-fifth metres. On this scale even super-clusters of galaxies are just clots of dust on a black background. The right hand side of each page, as you go through the book, zooms in by a factor of ten, and we dive into galaxy clusters, into our galaxy, our spiral arm, our solar system, through the moon's orbit and into the earth's atmosphere, down into North America, and then Chicago, and a picnicker asleep in a park. After twenty five pages we're at a human scale; the pictured scene is a metre across. But the camera continues to zoom in; to the picnicker's hand, through his skin to a lymphocyte, and on down through the cell nucleus to coils of DNA, to a carbon atom and through its electron cloud, and down to the nucleus and beyond. Sixteen pages from the picnicker have brought us to the quarks.

The left hand side of each page provides companion pictures and comments, some drawn from the history of science. For the nanometre picture there's a copy of John Dalton's two-hundred-year-old models of simple molecules; at the millimetre and tenth-millimetre scale there are pictures of radiolaria, seeds, and other microscopic beauties. All are interesting and informative.

I can't recommend this book too strongly--it's a fundamental work of scientific culture, and should be in every house. However, I particularly recommend that you buy this for any nine-to-fourteen-year-old child in your life; it's the best way I know to introduce a child to a love of science.

This is a great book. Believe it or not, I walk my 5 year old son through the pictures. I am sure it is not meant for youngsters but it can be used like I am am doing.

The idea behind the book is on its smallest scale it is inside a qark inside an atomic nucleus, inside an atom, attached to a DNA molecule, inside a nucleus of a white blood cell, slightly below the skin on a hand of a man asleep at a picnic on some grass in Chicago....all the way to the scale of the universe. My son and I will transverse the middle 1/3 or 1/2 of the journey. He gets to pick his own bedtime books and he chooses this one out of hundreds once or twice a week.

The pictures make a great way to explain the concept of scale and various aspects of science. On the facing page of the main picture underconsideration are objects of the same scale. You can really see that the tail of a dinosaur is 10 times longer than a man.

For the adult, it is an easy introduction to various aspects of science all at different scales. It is not a super serious book - no math - simple explanations. But as a practicing scientist, I view it as vary factual.

I've seen this book for the first time in 1985, when I was kid. It is still my all-time favorite.

Although the book does have lots of textual info pages, the core of the book is a series of 42 full-page pictures which depict the an ordinary picnic photo in different scales.

Starting from an ordinary dude resting on the grass, each page turn shows the scene from 10 times farther away. First we see the park he is picnicing on, then the entire city, and before you know it we are in deep space racing towards the outskirts of the Universe.

On the other side of the journey, each page turn magnifies the last picture tenfold. First by viewing a close-up view of the picnicing guy's hand, you quickly find yourself probing deeper and deeper through the realms of biology and chemistry right into the core of a single atom.

The really cool thing about the whole deal, is that all the images are centered at the same object: a single atom on the picnicing dude's hand.

In short, the idea is absolutely brilliant. The images chosen for the presentation is not perfect, but they are still amazing. Of-course, the film is much more impressive then the book, but you can't take a film with you to a camping trip...

The idea of zooming in from Universe to atoms and subatomic images through the skin of a man, who is taking an afternoon nap by Lakeshore Drive in Chicago, is amazing. A great book (after having seen a video many years ago) with great images. The scientific and historical information is brief and well documented. Additional images are provided to illustrate each magnitude of ten. A perfect gift for a curious young minds, an adult and a teacher's must. School libraries too!

The sequence of pictures, each zoomed by a factor of ten from the previous one, give the viewer in dramatic fashion a sense of our place in the universe, in a way words cannot convey. The side pictures and comments are beautiful and intriguing. The science is well-stated and plentiful. You can truly read this book backwards and forwards. It simultaneously excels as a work of science and as a work of art!

The premise of this book leads to one of the most fascinating demonstrations of what relative sizes really are. The first illustration is on the order of 10^25 meters, which is approximately 1 billion light years. At this level, even giant galaxies are little more than a dot of light. Subsequent illustrations move in by powers of ten, so by 10^23, our galaxy is now a large period with some evidence of a swirling structure. This zooming in continues until at the level of 10^1 meters, we see a man and a woman on a blanket in a grassy park on the edge of a marina in Chicago, Illinois. Their location was the central position of all previous illustrations.
The zooming in continues, the focus now in on the back of the man's right hand. At the level of 10^(-5) meters, we see an entire white blood cell. When the level of 10^(-8) meters is reached we see the structure of DNA and at the level of 10^(-14) meters, we see the nucleus of a carbon-12 atom. Finally, at the level of 10^(-16) we see nothing more than a random collection of colored splotches.
This is one of the best basic science books ever published; it should be read by all students before they get out of high school. Our brains have an inherent difficulty in grasping the enormous differences in size that exist in the universe. The illustrations are also an excellent lesson in the basic mathematics of exponents. From 25 to -16 is only 41 orders of magnitude and yet we have gone from what is close to the size of the universe down to the smallest objects that are currently known to exist.

I first saw this book in a film version, which was being used at the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum in Washington when I was about nine years old. It had a huge impact upon me. I will never forget the feeling of understanding the universe that this film gave me. Anyone with "math fear" can benefit from this -- it makes vast numbers not only comprehensible, but fascinating. This can make a terrific coffee table book, or something to leave around in a school library setting.

It is difficult to overstate how effective a teaching tool this book can be. I'm not kidding. If you are a primary school science or math teacher, you OWE it to the children you teach to get a copy of this. You will be doing them a disservice if you don't expose them to this. I'm not exaggerating, the book is just amazing. My rating -- 37 quadrillion thumbs up.

This book is an introductory peek at one of the most foundational mathematical tools needed for any consideration of cosmology, astronomy, and/or particle physics:
"At one end, far out where the galaxies appear like glowing froth in darkness, all our sciences become only one: cosmology. ... At the other end, for the very small we again have one science only: particle physics. There are even hints that the two ends inform each other." Evidence, perhaps, that television isn't all bad, the concept here was developed for a TV special program (quite a few years ago now), then plucked from video to print. It's a 'can't miss' premise but I find the writing to be slightly awkward and there may be too many illustrations. For a book that begs me to pick it up, it too easily invites me to put it down. Even so, it makes for a reasonably good overview of a universe more than 20 billion light years wide made out of stuff so small that we must describe it using negative powers of ten. The idea here is to illustrate the dramatic changes of scale involved in only a few powers of ten, and thus the "power" of powers of ten. The book's theme is itself quite modest, but for the reader unfamiliar with the concept of exponential notation, this small volume may be a startling revelation. To those familiar with the concept, the book may be a mere novelty, perhaps a "coffee table book."

I have owned this amazing book for 15 years and continue to visit it again and again. I've given it to many friends and family members, and no one has failed to be knocked out by it.

This is not only a beautiful book to look at, it is an intellectual treasure, sharing some of science's most profound discoveries with the reader. I can't reccomend this book enough. It turns the world into a dream.