Time In Powers Of Ten: Natural Phenomena And Their Timescales - Hardcover

The somewhat facetious narrating style and the abundance of illustrations are so inviting and rather addictive once you picked up the book. --European Mathematical Society

Pleasingly accessible volume that will give pleasure to academics, students, connoisseurs of coffee-table books and even the people who compile questions for Trivial Pursuit... Can be enjoyed as a source of scientific stories and images, as an unusual perspective on history, as a popular account of modern physics, and so on. Underneath them all is a wealth of serious science that will give readers insights into abstract fundamental ideas via concrete realities... Every science teacher would benefit from reading Time in Powers of Ten, but I hope it will have an even wider reach. --Times Higher Education

The authors have compiled a refreshing mix of historical anecdotes and examples from music to sport and biology to astronomy to lighten up the heavier taste of particle physics and cosmology... It is both an enjoyable read and very pleasant to browse at leisure... It fully conveys the authors' amazement at — as Feynman put it — our fantastically marvellous universe. --Nature Physics

With a Foreword by Steven WeinbergIn this richly illustrated book, Nobel Laureate Gerard 't Hooft and Theoretical Physicist Stefan Vandoren describe the enormous diversity of natural phenomena that take place at different time scales.In the tradition of the bestseller Powers of Ten, the authors zoom in and out in time, each step with a factor of ten. Starting from one second, time scales are enlarged until processes are reached that take much longer than the age of the universe. After the largest possible eternities, the reader is treated to the shortest and fastest phenomena known. Then the authors increase with powers of ten, until again the second is reached at the end of the book.At each time scale, interesting natural phenomena occur, spread over all scientific disciplines: orbital and rotation periods of planets and stars, decay times of elementary particles and atoms, biological rhythms and evolution processes, but also the different geological time scales. remove