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    The Zoomable Universe: An Epic Tour Through Cosmic Scale, from Almost Everything to Nearly Nothing
    The Zoomable Universe: An Epic Tour Through Cosmic Scale, from Almost Everything to Nearly Nothing
    The Zoomable Universe: An Epic Tour Through Cosmic Scale, from Almost Everything to Nearly Nothing
    Ebook236 pages2 hours

    The Zoomable Universe: An Epic Tour Through Cosmic Scale, from Almost Everything to Nearly Nothing

    By Caleb Scharf and Ron Miller

    4.5/5

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    About this ebook

    An epic, full-color visual journey through all scales of the universe

    In The Zoomable Universe, the award-winning astrobiologist Caleb Scharf and the acclaimed artist Ron Miller take us on an epic tour through all known scales of reality, from the largest possible magnitude to the smallest. Drawing on cutting-edge science, they begin at the limits of the observable universe, a scale spanning 10^27 meters—about 93 billion light-years. And they end in the subatomic realm, at 10^-35 meters, where the fabric of space-time itself confounds all known rules of physics. In between are galaxies, stars and planets, oceans and continents, plants and animals, microorganisms, atoms, and much, much more. Stops along the way—all enlivened by Scharf’s sparkling prose and his original insights into the nature of our universe—include the brilliant core of the Milky Way, the surface of a rogue planet, the back of an elephant, and a sea of jostling quarks.

    The Zoomable Universe is packed with more than 100 original illustrations and infographics that will captivate readers of every age. It is a whimsical celebration of discovery, a testament to our astounding ability to see beyond our own vantage point and chart a course from the farthest reaches of the cosmos to its subatomic depths—in short, a must-have for the shelves of all explorers.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherMacmillan Publishers
    Release dateOct 17, 2017
    ISBN9780374279745
    The Zoomable Universe: An Epic Tour Through Cosmic Scale, from Almost Everything to Nearly Nothing
    Author

    Caleb Scharf

    Caleb Scharf is the director of the Columbia Astrobiology Center. He writes the Life, Unbounded blog for Scientific American; has written for New Scientist, Science, and Nature, among other publications; and has served as a consultant for the Discovery Channel, the Science Channel, The New York Times, and more. Scharf has served as a keynote speaker for the American Museum of Natural History and the Rubin Museum of Art, and is the author of Extrasolar Planets and Astrobiology, winner of the 2011 Chambliss Astronomical Writing Award from the American Astronomical Society. He lives in New York City with his wife and two daughters.

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    4.5/5

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    • 5/5
      This was an awesome journey that gave me a sense of being a part of a universe aware of itself. The trip goes in a very logical order and the writing is clear and entertaining as well. It has many illustrations. I read this in ebook format on a tablet so that I could zoom in on the images and see them in color. The science is made understandable, or at least as much as is possible when we get down to those very small bits.
    • 4/5
      A great and fascinating look from the cosmos down to the atoms, the nuts and bolts and more of how the universe (and us, and everything) works. The book does a really good job of explaining more of the jargon and technical side and hard to understand aspects of the science (quarks, string theory, quantum mechanics, foam, multi-verse, etc.) Some of the science was a bit dumbed down and a few liberties taken to make things make sense (laymen wise) but overall it was done for the better good and to make things make more sense as a whole.

      The artwork in the book is absolutely beautiful and the infographics are very well done and help showcase whatever is being discussed.

    Book preview

    The Zoomable Universe - Caleb Scharf

    THE ZOOMABLE UNIVERSE

    AN EPIC TOUR THROUGH COSMIC SCALE, FROM ALMOST EVERYTHING TO NEARLY NOTHING

    CALEB SCHARF

    ILLUSTRATIONS BY RON MILLER

    AND 5W INFOGRAPHICS

    SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN / FARRAR, STRAUS AND GIROUX

    NEW YORK

    .

    Begin Reading

    Table of Contents

    About the Author

    Copyright Page

    Thank you for buying this

    Farrar, Straus and Giroux ebook.

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    The author and publisher have provided this e-book to you for your personal use only. You may not make this e-book publicly available in any way. Copyright infringement is against the law. If you believe the copy of this e-book you are reading infringes on the author’s copyright, please notify the publisher at: http://us.macmillanusa.com/piracy.

    To all explorers. Of the past, present, and future.

    PREFACE

    Do you want to hear the most epic story ever?

    A long time ago the atoms in your body were spread across trillions of kilometers of otherwise empty space. Billions of years in the past there was no hint that they would eventually come to be configured as your eyes, your skin, your hair, your bones, or the eighty-six billion neurons of your brain.

    Many of these atoms came from deep inside a star—perhaps several stars, themselves separated by many trillions of kilometers. As these stars exploded, they hurled matter outward in a flood of scorching gas that filled a small part of one galaxy out of hundreds of billions of other galaxies, arrayed throughout a gaping maw of space and time almost a trillion trillion kilometers across.

    Despite being scattered in the cosmos, these atoms eventually became part of a world, our world, Earth. They cooled and condensed together, drawn by gravity, becoming new stuff, a billion trillion times denser than when they were just floating in space. For four and a half billion more years they shape-shifted into lots of different guises.

    Some of these atoms were part of the very first microscopic bubbles of living complexity in otherwise empty oceans and continents. And many of the very same atoms have been discarded and picked up a billion or more times as they’ve traveled through Earth’s environment.

    They’ve been in the shell of a trilobite, perhaps thousands of trilobites. They’ve been in tentacles, roots, feet, wings, blood, and trillions, quadrillions of bacteria in between. Some have floated in the eyes of creatures that once looked out across the landscapes of a hundred million years ago. Yet others have nestled in the yolks of dinosaur eggs, or hung in the exhaled breath of a panting creature in the depths of an ice age. For other atoms this is their first time settling into a living organism, having drifted through eons in oceans and clouds, part of a trillion raindrops or a billion snowflakes. Now, at this instant, they are all here, making you.

    Each atom is itself a composite that’s about a tenth of a billionth of a meter across—sitting on the precipitous edge of a universe between our perceived reality and the quantum world. Electrons hazily occupy much of the atom’s empty space. Protons and neutrons cluster in a nucleus, a hundred thousand times smaller than its atom, and are themselves composed of other stupendously small things, quarks and gluons. An electron may have no meaningful property of size but can be thought of as ten million times smaller than the nucleus. And, at some point, 13.8 billion years ago, all these components of all the atoms in the universe were squeezed into a far smaller, hugely energetic origin of space and time. Although that origin is now vastly expanded, we’re still inside its envelope, along with any being that may exist a billion light-years from here. We’re not truly disconnected, even now.

    It’s quite a tall tale. Except this is not fiction. It’s our current best shot at recounting what has really happened in the past 13.8 billion years.

    The purpose of The Zoomable Universe is to try to capture more of this story, to lead you through what we know (and what we don’t) about the entirety of nature. To do that we’ve turned to a tried-and-true approach: the simple premise of a tenfold zooming view to tour the universe, from the edge of the observable cosmos to the innermost knots of reality.

    The conceit of a journey through the scales of nature is not new, and doing it scientifically goes back at least as far as Micrographia, published by Robert Hooke in 1665. Works like the seminal 1957 book Cosmic View: The Universe in 40 Jumps, by Kees Boeke, and the short films Cosmic Zoom, by the National Film Board of Canada (1968), and Powers of Ten, by Charles and Ray Eames (1977), as well as many derivatives in subsequent years, demonstrate our universal love of cosmic journeys.

    It seemed that the time was ripe to make a contribution that not only brought the core material fully up to date but added focus on the intricate connectivity of the universe. Atoms here in my hand are related to atoms over there, or on the next planet, or halfway across the cosmos. The physics that operates inside us is the same that operates on other scales, and at other cosmic times. And the patterns and emergent phenomena that infuse our day-to-day experiences share rules and properties in countless surprising ways throughout nature.

    From fingers and toes to modern mathematics and measurements, we can all grasp the notion of powers of ten, sizes that shift by ten times or by a tenth. Chain these sliding scales together and we have a language for expressing the continuities and relationships of nature that extend far outside our ordinary everyday experience. The powers of ten let us zoom from almost everything to nearly nothing.

    This book is a synopsis, a cheat sheet if you will. It can’t recount every exact detail of the contents and history of the universe. Instead, it treats the reality we know as a zoomable map with a preset path to follow. In video-game parlance, it’s a rail shooter. That rail follows the physical scales of the cosmos—starting at the top and zooming on down.

    As we wrote and illustrated this journey, we agonized over how to build this rail. The cosmos has three dimensions of space, and that tricky thing we call time. There are also trillions of interesting things to take a look at along the way. We’ve tried to balance the idea of a grand overview with making sure we visited some very, very cool places en route.

    Some of the waypoints are intellectually challenging—even in Chapter 1 you’ll have to contend with the strange concept of dark matter, an expanding universe, and even stranger things like multiple universes and multiple versions of you. In Chapter 3 you’ll have to grapple with the majestic origins of the solar system. By Chapter 6 you’ll be puzzling over the nature of consciousness, and by Chapter 9 you’ll be tackling interpretations of quantum mechanics. Don’t worry—the beautiful illustrations and infographics will help delight and inform you along the way.

    We hope you enjoy finding your own connections among the gloriously varied pieces of data and knowledge that bring our vision of reality together. Remember, it’s your universe as much as anyone else’s.

    1

    ALMOST EVERYTHING

    10²⁷, 10²⁶, 10²⁵, 10²⁴, 10²³ meters

    From about 93 billion light-years to 10 million light-years

    From the diameter of the cosmic horizon to the size of the Local Group of galaxies

    It’s a summer morning. You’re sitting in a sunlit room holding this book, reading this page, and about to start a journey through cosmic scale.

    Looking up, you notice that tiny specks of glowing dust are caught in the beams of light streaming through the windows. These bright pinpoints loft and swirl in the air currents, like a swarm of mysterious creatures.

    The specks are microscopic, yet if the whole room were to represent the size of the observable universe, each of these dusty motes would be the size of an entire galaxy of stars.

    Now follow a single sunlit speck. This is our galaxy, the Milky Way. It is home to more than 200 billion stars, and at least that number of planets. These stars and planets span a structure that is a hundred thousand light-years across—a distance of more than nine hundred thousand trillion kilometers. At a walking pace, it would take you twenty trillion years to cross this object.

    Packed deep inside, hidden among these billions of other worlds, is one particular planet we call Earth. This world is a modest rocky orb with a thin coating of crystallized mineral crust atop a hot interior, lightly painted with water and atmosphere. It orbits a lonesome star that we call the Sun—one star, only 4.5 billion years old in a 10-billion-year-old galaxy.

    Now think about all the things that you know and experience in your life. Your family, friends, dogs, cats, small furry rodents, horses, houses, couches, beds, pizza, apples, oranges, trees, flowers, insects, dirt, clouds, water, snow, rain, mud, sunshine, and starry nights.

    Then think about all the people who have ever lived (a total of around 110 billion individual, biologically modern humans) and all that they knew in their lives. All these people, billions upon billions of them, experiencing their surroundings for centuries, decades, years, months, days,

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