A guide for time travellers
Institute for Quantum Electronics (IQE)
A new book illustrates time scales from 10–16 to 1018 seconds. A Journey into Time in Powers of Ten, produced by the NCCR MUST, provides context and food for many 'second thoughts'.
In 35 double-page spreads, the reader is taken from the motions performed by electrons, photons and molecules to the processes in biological systems — the blink of an eye included — and on to geological, planetary and cosmological time scales. Each power of ten is beautifully illustrated and described in a short text, written by an expert in the field concerned.
The book originated from an idea of Prof. Jürg Osterwalder (University of Zurich), one of the professors in the external page NCCR MUST network, which is directed by ETH physicist Prof. Ursula Keller and Prof. Thomas Feurer of the University of Bern. As a child, Osterwalder was inspired by the Power of Ten film of Charles and Ray Eames and the subsequently published book by Philip and Phylis Morrison. These works focus on showing what happens at different spatial scales, going in steps of powers of ten. The central point is a couple having a picnic on a blanket in Chicago, and from there the journey goes into the vastness of space and then down to the subatomic scale. Osterwalder’s idea was to create a book that started in the centre at one second, the blink of an eye, and looked at what happened at ever shorter and at ever longer time scales.
The original aim was to put the science of the MUST research network, which mainly is concerned with time scales from 10–10 to 10–18 seconds, in perspective for a wider audience. Taking up Osterwalder's idea, Anna Garry and Thomas Feurer set out to find examples for a broad range of time scales, eventually covering the window from 10–16 to 1018 seconds. In a collaborative effort, Garry and Feurer approached contributions from a variety of disciplines, from anthropology and astronomy to geology and meterology. In the end, 54 contributors had a hand in this unique, inspiring book.
A Journey into Time in Powers of Ten is available from external page vdf Hochschulverlag. In autumn 2016, there will be an exhibition on ETH Hönggerberg, inspired by the book. We will inform about that event in due course.