Imagining the Universe

by Edward Packard

A comprehensive explanation of the human body and the galaxy enables readers to visualize difficult-to-perceive concepts, defines confusing terms, and chronicles time from the "Big Bang" to the end of the universe. Original.

Genres: Science

Mass Market Paperback

First published December 1, 1994

About the author

Edward Packard attended and graduated from both Princeton University and Columbia Law School. He was one of the first authors to explore the idea of gamebooks, in which the reader is inserted as the main character and makes choices about the direction the story will go at designated places in the text.

The first such book that Edward Packard wrote in the Choose Your Own Adventure series was titled "Sugarcane Island", but it was not actually published as the first entry in the Choose Your Own Adventure Series. In 1979, the first book to be released in the series was "The Cave of Time", a fantasy time-travel story that remained in print for many years. Eventually, one hundred eighty-four Choose Your Own Adventure books would be published before production on new entries to the series ceased in 1998. Edward Packard was the author of many of these books, though a substantial number of other authors were included as well.

In 2005, Choose Your Own Adventure books once again began to be published, but none of Edward Packard's titles have yet been included among the newly-released books.

Reviews

[Chase Parsley · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a nifty little book from CYOA master Edward Packard about the size and time of our universe. It is illustrated and easy to understand. Perhaps it is not fair to judge almost 30 years after the publishing date, but the graphics seem a bit lacking, even for the mid-90s.

If you enjoy pondering the size of the universe and its span of time, this is a wonderful book to pick up for all ages!

[Kitap Yakıcı · Rating 4 out of 5]

I have always had a fondness for images (infographics!) which give a sense of the relative sizes of different objects, including mountains, skyscrapers, and statues. This book presents the extremes in scale—from the quantum-scale to the galactic super cluster—and does so in a delightfully San Francisco-centric way, by using a baseball in Candlestick Park as its initial unit of reference. A baseball-sized Sun hovering over home plate, for example, would have outer planets passing through Oakland, and a cell the size of the same baseball would result in state-sized insects! Not as information dense as Powers of Ten , but their approaches to visualizing relative size and scale complement one another nicely.

[Payback · Rating 5 out of 5]

Absolutely outstanding.

[Yvensong · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a great reference book for those who use visual clues for understanding our universe.