Invisible Worlds: Exploring The Unseen

by Piers Bizony

Take an amazing and truly awe-inspiring visual voyage, courtesy of 100 incredible images made from the most sophisticated, cutting-edge technology, and see what can’t be seen with the naked eye.

It’s an eye-opening from the smashing of atoms to the diffraction of X-rays skimming through a crystal of DNA, the deepest patterns of nature’s building blocks are revealed to thrilling effect thanks to revolutionary technology. These thoroughly breathtaking images delve deep into the invisible world, letting us peer into the hidden secrets of heat, sound, and all manner of exotic energies and radiations. View the human body as seen in a colored Magnetic Resonance Imaging scan; a photo of a huge solar prominence, taken by an Extreme Ultraviolet Imaging Telescope; an enhanced electron scan of tiny dust mites; and striking spots of light from the distant galaxies. Computer simulations, powered by 21st-century mathematics, hint that there are still greater truths out there. It’s as unbelievable as the best science fiction—and it’s all true.

Genres: Nonfiction, Science

231 pages, Hardcover

First published July 1, 2004

About the author

Piers Bizony is a science journalist and space historian who writes for magazines such as Focus and Wired as well as the Independent. His award-winning book on Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey was described as 'full of sparkling enthusiasm' by the New Scientist and 'excellent, in every way worthy of Kubrick's original precision-crafted vision' by the Evening Standard.

Reviews

[Pete daPixie · Rating 3 out of 5]

Invisible Worlds is another one of those coffee table books, that can be seen scattered across those useless midget tables in photographs in colour magazines of Sunday Newspapers, advertising furniture polish.
Fear not, Bizony's book won't turn you into a middle class ponce. Exploring the unseen, by way of the many extraordinary photographs, is quite a prolific page turner. From images of the microscopic, by way of the electron microscope, all the way to a layout of the cosmic microwave background of the universe, derived from infra-red satellite data. The reading is quick and easy as well as up to date scientifically. The reader doesn't have to be any kind of expert in biology, astronomy, cosmology, particle physics, or any kind of 'ology'. It's the full page photographs that this book is about. All taken outside the wavelengths of light that the human eye detects.

[Alexis · Rating 4 out of 5]

One of the most interesting graphical science books. Unlike most scientific books this one uses information we have gained from our technologies and mathematical understandings of the nature of reality and asks deeply philosophical questions about what we know to be real.

[Jide Adefope]

Accessible book to particle physics!