By Gerard ’t Hooft and Stefan Vandoren (translated by Saskia Eisberg-’t Hooft)
World Scientific
Hardback: £31
Paperback: £16
E-book: £12
Also available at the CERN bookshop
With powers of 10, one cannot fail to think of the iconic 1970s film made by Charles and Ray Eames – a journey through the universe departing from a picnic blanket somewhere in Chicago. However, this book is not about distance scales, rather time. And the universe it reveals is one of constant turmoil and evolution. No vast empty wastelands here, where nothing changes across many powers of 10. Journeying across the time scales, we discover a universe teeming with activity at every stage – processing, ticking, cycling, continuously moving, changing, surprising.
Every page brims with the authors’ evident enthusiasm for the workings of the universe, be it the esoteric or the more mundane. I would never have expected to read a book where cosmic microwave background radiation sits side by side with the problems of traffic congestion in the US (time = 10 trillion seconds).
Leaping in powers of 10, the book races through stories of life, the Earth and the solar system, and on to physical processes quadrillions of times the age of the universe itself. The largest and smallest of time scales transport the reader to the strange and fascinating. Just as with distance scales, the very small and the very large are intimately entwined.
There is a gap between the more anecdotal and the more scientific. Record sprint times (time = 10 seconds) and the rhythm of our biological clock (time = 100,000 seconds) are light interludes in contrast with the decay modes of the ηc meson (time = 10 yoctoseconds) and the Lamb shift (time = 1 nanosecond). While this eclecticism is part of the book’s charm, some scientific baggage is required to enjoy the contents fully.
Where the book fails, is in the design. Visually, it is a little dull. With disparate styles of graphic illustrations, many taken from Wikipedia, the image quality is not up to that of the text. A clever design could take readers on a visual voyage, adding to the impact of the writing. The story warrants this effort.
It is striking that mysteries exist at every time scale, not only at the extremes – be it the high magnetic field of pulsars (time = 1 second), the explanation of high-temperature superconductors (time = 10 million seconds) or the origin of water on Earth (time = 100 quadrillion seconds). The book reveals the extraordinary complexity of our universe – it is a fascinating journey.
