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The solar system unfolds before your eyes in this cheeky, myth-busting book (grounded in real math)!
Quick: Picture the solar system. Do you see nine planets on tidy rings around the Sun? Then you have been lied to!
It’s not without reason: We have to draw the solar system that way to fit it on a place mat, or a lunch box, or into an ordinary book. But that familiar diagram is wrong about almost everything—and so this is no ordinary book. Seven double-gatefold pages open out not once but twice, capturing our planetary neighbors at scale.
At a 100,000,000,000-to-1 scale, the Sun is about the size of a dime. And five feet away from the Sun, we find . . . Earth, the size of a pinhead. A hundred-billion-to-one scale is not nearly small enough to fit our solar system into a book (or onto a soccer field)! How small do we need to go? Unfold the next three spreads to find out . . .
★ Winner of the 2024 AAAS/Subaru SB&F Prize for Excellence in Science Books
“This short book uses multiple large pullout sections, six landscape pages wide, to illustrate the Solar System . . . a great way to show how vast and empty the Solar System is.”—Science“Conversational narration uses tongue-in-cheek humor to point out that the planets do not match the neat circular orbits that textbooks depict. Gatefolds, plus an accessible discussion of scale using the metric system, clarify cosmic distances. . . . Sure to leave audiences feeling incredulous—and incredibly small.”—Publishers Weekly