Tim in Powers of Ten: Natural Phenomena and Their Timescales

by Gerard 't Hooft, Stefan Vandoren, Steven Weinberg (Foreword)

In 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 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.

Genres: Science, Physics

212 pages, Hardcover

First published July 30, 2013

About the author

Gerard 't Hooft Professor at Utrecht University, the Netherlands. Shared 1999 Nobel Prize in Physics

Reviews

[Cade · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is an ideal book for reading in the bathroom. It consists of many chapters, each about physical phenomena with a duration/timescale of a certain order of magnitude from the Planck time all the way up to the largest conceivable future age of the universe. The forward describes this book as a coffee table book because it is not intended to be read straight through, and it is indeed attractively laid out and illustrated. However, this is not a "Big Book of Barns" type of book where you just look at the pictures with a token caption. The meat is the text with some token pictures for visual effect. The text is a translation, but it is very well-written with a plain and concise style suitable to such a book.

This book loses 1 star for all the radioactive element half-lives. I think it is interesting that elements have half-lives spanning many orders of magnitude, but I don't really care to see which specific isotope has a half-life of X seconds in every chapter. I also deduct another star just for general effect. This was a book I admired but didn't hugely enjoy. This is probably my own fault as I did what the authors warned against doing which was reading the book cover-to-cover in a few days like it was a narrative.

[Mills College Library]

502 H778 2014