How the Universe Works: An Illustrated Guide to the Cosmos and All We Know About It (Volume 3) (How Things Work, 3)

My friends and I find the universe simply fascinating and love discussing it. I don't think there's a better book out there on the universe than How The Universe Works! It's fantastic!

This is the third one I buy. People keep asking me to take it, so I just give it away and buy another.

I got it for the pretty pictures

this book tells how the universe works NO Internet Connection needed

Little disappointed. Less than 1/2 the book (3 out of 8 chapters) discussed how the Universe works. Other chapter headings....History of Astronomy....the Space Race..Exploration Missions....all interesting topics but they seem more about man's efforts. Could also have lived without yet another attempt at legitimatizing evolution as the only plausible explanation to the origins of life.

This is a fascinating and rewarding book, although sometimes it struck me that the authors were trying to do too much.For example, the treatment of the solar system is excellent. There is a thorough and clear explanation of the basic structure of the system, and then of the sun and of each planet and how they all fit into the overall picture. On the other hand, the book actually opens with a description of the Big Bang and segues into a discussion of relativity, particular physics, and fundamental forces and elementary particles. While beautifully illustrated, if you don't already know most of the material I think the text would be too brief and cryptic to be of much value. And some of it is a bit random. There is a fine chapter on the geology of the Earth, but then a few pages on is "The Origin of Life" which tries to travel from prokaryotes to the present in 10 pages. A "History of Astronomy" also includes a two page spread on relativity and another on the Large Hadron Collider.Even though it is not suggested by the title or set up by the first half of the book, the second half is where the narrative unexpectedly hits its stride. Opening with "The Space Race", we get an excellent recounting of early space exploration, manned flights, and the Apollo missions. This blends directly into an extended treatment of all of the current exploratory missions, with very nice chapters on each of the major planetary projects, as well as the deep space probes. I don't know if that falls under the heading "how the universe works", but it was still interesting.Putting aside the oddly herky-jerky organization of the book, the volume really excels as a graphical introduction to all of these concepts and topics. It isn't just pretty pictures of planets and collections of Hubble photos. There are timelines, maps, detailed graphs, summaries and tabulations, and illustrations of various processes, that are powerful and effective educational tools. (Heck, there's a two-page spread of three dimensional models that show, to scale, Earth's closest star, galaxy and supercluster neighbors, that you could just study for half an hour.) The cross-section diagrams of the planets are amongst the best I've seen, and many of the pages have a definite "wow!" factor.So, I thought this was interesting and educational. Some books are designed to be scalable, by which I mean a reader can start a chapter and the chapter gets progressively more demanding and complex as it goes on. The reader can pause once he's in over his head and move on to the next chapter, in which the process repeats. This book isn't like that. Both between chapters and within chapters the level of difficulty is constantly changing. There is much in the book for any level reader, and it might be that this is best approached as a browsable book, to be dipped into and out of. Viewed in that way, and maybe just on the strength of the graphics, this book delivered.(Please note that I received a free advance will-self-destruct-in-x-days Adobe Digital copy of this book without a review requirement, or any influence regarding review content should I choose to post a review. Apart from that I have no connection at all to either the author or the publisher of this book.)

This book is interesting and fun to read, and does a great job of covering history, such as the space race or history of astronomy. And the illustrations are beautiful. But too much of the book is spent on things other than explaining the cosmos. And when discussing the cosmos, it is weak at explaining certain phenomena, thus prior knowledge is required to understand some of the material. One of the irritants was that the content on any one page wasn't always well organized. But overall it was still worth reading.Disclosure: I received a complimentary copy of this book via Netgalley for review purposes.