To see accurate pricing, please choose your delivery country.
 
 
United States
£ GBP
All Shops

British Wildlife

8 issues per year 84 pages per issue Subscription only

British Wildlife is the leading natural history magazine in the UK, providing essential reading for both enthusiast and professional naturalists and wildlife conservationists. Published eight times a year, British Wildlife bridges the gap between popular writing and scientific literature through a combination of long-form articles, regular columns and reports, book reviews and letters.

Subscriptions from £33 per year

Conservation Land Management

4 issues per year 44 pages per issue Subscription only

Conservation Land Management (CLM) is a quarterly magazine that is widely regarded as essential reading for all who are involved in land management for nature conservation, across the British Isles. CLM includes long-form articles, events listings, publication reviews, new product information and updates, reports of conferences and letters.

Subscriptions from £26 per year
Academic & Professional Books  Reference  Physical Sciences  Popular Science

How Big is Big and How Small is Small The Sizes of Everything and Why

Popular Science
By: Timothy Paul Smith(Author)
272 pages, 61 b/w illustrations
How Big is Big and How Small is Small
Click to have a closer look
  • How Big is Big and How Small is Small ISBN: 9780199681198 Hardback Oct 2013 Not in stock: Usually dispatched within 6 days
    £41.99
    #206079
Price: £41.99
About this book Contents Customer reviews Biography Related titles

About this book

How Big is Big and How Small is Small is about how big the universe is and how small quarks are, and what the sizes of dozens of things are between these two extremes. It describes the sizes of atoms and planets, quarks and galaxies, cells and sequoias. It is a romp through forty-five orders of magnitude from the smallest sub-nuclear particles we have measured, to the edge of the observed universe. It also looks at time, from the epic age of the cosmos to the fleeting lifetimes of ethereal particles. It is a narrative that trips its way from stellar magnitudes to the clocks on GPS satellites, from the nearly logarithmic scales of a piano keyboard through a system of numbers invented by Archimedes and on to the measurement of the size of an atom.

Why do some things happen at certain scales? Why are cells a hundred thousandths of a meter across? Why are stars never smaller than about 100 million meters in diameter? Why are trees limited to about 120 meters in height? Why are planets spherical, but asteroids not? Often the size of an object is determined by something simple but quite unexpected. The size of a cell and a star depend in part on the ratio of surface area to volume. The divide between the size of a spherical planet and an irregular asteroid is the balance point between the gravitational forces and the chemical forces in nature.

Most importantly, with a very few basic principles, it all makes sense. The world really is a most reasonable place.

Contents

1: From Quarks to the Cosmos - An Introduction
2: Scales of the Living World
3: Big Numbers; Avogadro's Number
4: Scales of Nature
5: Little Numbers; Boltzmann's and Planck's Constant
6: The Sand Reckoner
7: Energy
8: Fleeting Moments of Time
9: Deep and Epic Time
10: Down to Atoms
11: How Small is Small
12: Stepping Into Space - The Scales of the Solar System
13: From the Stars to the Edge of the Universe
14: A Little Chapter About Truly Big Numbers
15: Forces That Sculpture Nature and Shape Destiny

Customer Reviews

Biography

Tim Smith is a Research Professor at Dartmouth College where he teaches Physics and Environmental Studies. Before then he was a Research Scientist at the MIT accelerator where he spent a decade as part of a team building an experiment to measure the arrangement of quarks inside of neutrons and protons. He has written magazine articles about neutrons, wind power and hiking. In this book he gets to explore all that and much more.

Popular Science
By: Timothy Paul Smith(Author)
272 pages, 61 b/w illustrations
Media reviews

"Smith's book How Big is Big and How Small is Small is a most enjoyable read, erudite and entertaining. You can learn a great deal not just about how and why we measure things the way we do, but also what limits the sizes of the smallest and largest animals as well as the smallest and largest objects in the Universe. It also puts our human lives into (a Cosmic) perspective. I highly recommend it."
- Vlatko Vedral, Professor of Quantum Information Theory at the University of Oxford and the National University of Singapore

Current promotions
New and Forthcoming BooksNHBS Moth TrapBritish Wildlife MagazineBuyers Guides