Powers of Ten

by Phylis Morrison, Philip Morrison, Ray Eames, et al.

Book Overview

In 42 consecutive scenes - each at a different power of ten level of magnification - readers are taken from the dimension of one billion light years to the size of an atom. The text describes what we can perceive at each progressively smaller level of magnitude.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0716760088
• ISBN13: 9780716760085
• Release Date: January 1994
• Publisher: W.H. Freeman & Company
• Length: 150 Pages
• Weight: 0.90 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.4" x 8.5" x 9.3"

Customer Reviews

Powers of Ten -- a Flipbook

Charles and Ray Eames give us a photographic tour of the universe we can hold in our hands. Starting with a picture of the dark emptiness of at the edge of the universe, each page brings us closer to our galaxy, solar system, planet, and down to the one power of ten on which we humans live. But then we continue to dive deeper -- skin deep -- shrinking smaller and smaller through the cells, molecules, and finally sub-atomic space of which we are composed... finding the empty space within the atom to be eerily reminiscent of outer space itself. It's an exciting, thought-provoking five-minute journey you'll want to take again and again.

A picture is worth a 10³ words! Amazing!

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...

No doubt deserves 5 stars; SURPRIZE it can be a child's book

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.

A Wonderful Ride Through The Powers Of Ten.

With a start at 10e+25 meters, from the far end of the universe (~1 billion light years), the book takes 1 power of ten steps downward to the subatomic level, about 10e-16 meters - or smaller than a hydrogen atom. A very good book to get lost in the comparison from one power to the next - be it higher (bigger) or lower (smaller).

Influential and awe-inspiring

"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.