And overall, 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. I would perhaps have liked more examples from other areas, especially of ultrafast phenomena but the authors promise a future fleshier version of the book, to which I will be looking forward to. The book is rich in examples from nuclear and particle physics: half-lives of different isotopes and subatomic particles. I would hesitate to call it truly popular science, as the authors don't shy away from writing down nuclear reactions or Feynman diagrams, and they invoke a zoo of subatomic particles - enough to intimidate even scientists. Some parts are light and very accessible even to the general reader, while others require scientific background and inclination to fully appreciate. The authors call it a coffee-table book and the beautiful illustrations certainly make it delightful to browse. Time in Powers of Ten is a bold enterprise - giving the reader a feeling of the various timescales, quantified by the powers of ten, through fascinating examples of natural phenomena. 't Hooft and Vandoren not only take the challenge of writing about time, but also attempt to illustrate this elusive concept.
But time is much more difficult to grasp.
Visualizing length scales is not that difficult - with a stretch of imagination, one might even picture the vastness of galactic clusters, the smallness of an atomic nucleus or the emptiness between it and its electrons.
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