I won this book in a giveaway competition on goodreads.com. I read it on holiday while lying by the pool and not that I needed it but what a great book to take your mind on a journey to remove it from your every day life. It is a great science book where each chapter scales both up and down by a factor of ten explaining what is found at that many orders of magnitude removed from our human scale. I found it does an amazing job of putting things in context, especially bringing home just how insignificant we human beings really are.
One thing I really liked about this book is how accessible Richard Farr makes Science even if you’ve never heard of a lot of things he is writing about. In a few paragraphs on page 55 there is the most concise and informative explanations I have ever come across about how the heavy elements are made inside stars and how crucial the element iron is to that process, which I never knew before. As the measurements in each chapter become more and more difficult to comprehend Richard Farr does some great analogies such as:
If you were to shrink to the size of a red blood cell it would take you several days to hike across your dining room table.
The Pacific is to the Sahara as a postcard is to a stamp.
If the Earth is the size of a grain of salt, the sun is a mouse and the largest known star is the size of a blue whale!
Another thing I really liked about this book is that even though it is quite short, almost every chapter is packed full of interesting facts. A few I pulled out of the relevant chapter:
1. If the history of our planet was a timeline the length of your arm, and you filed the tip of your fingernail it will wipe out the entire history of our species.
2. There are only one percent of the population of blue Whales left in the wild out of an original five million.
3. All the ants in the world weigh more than all the humans. A third of all insects are beetles.
4. If you look at black and white lines next to each other, with each being narrower than a human hair, all you will see is grey.
5. Your brain has as many cells as there are stars in the milky way. There are ten times more cells in your body that aren’t you than are.
7. The Andes mountain range stretches further than the Earth is deep.
9. The Sun has enough fuel to last a million times as long as all of recorded human history.
10. There are 100 thousand trillion atoms in a grain of sand. 14 million for each person on earth
Oh and one last fact that I just found out while writing this review which isn’t in the book but closely related to the topic:
There are more stars in the universe than grains of sand on all the beaches in the world.
If stuff like that blows your mind, read this book. In fact everyone should read this book.
Overall: 85%