Product Description
The world is made up of structures too small to see with the naked eye, too small to see even with an electron microscope. Einstein established the reality of atoms and molecules in the early 1900s. How can we see a world measured in fractions of nanometers? (Most atoms are less than one nanometer, less than one-billionth of a meter, in diameter.) This beautiful and fascinating book gives us a tour of the invisible nanoscale world. It offers many vivid color illustrations of atomic structures, each accompanied by a short, engagingly written essay. The structures advance from the simple (air, ice) to the complex (supercapacitor, rare earth magnet). Each subject was chosen not in search of comprehensiveness but because it illustrates how atomic structure creates a property (such as hardness, color, or toxicity), or because it has a great story, or simply because it is beautiful. Thus we learn how diamonds ride volcanoes to the earth’s surface (if they came up more slowly, they’d be graphite, as in pencils); what form of carbon is named after Buckminster Fuller; who won in the x-ray vs. mineralogy professor smackdown; how a fuel cell works; when we use spinodal decomposition in our daily lives (it involves hot water and a package of Jell-O), and much more. The amazing color illustrations by Stephen Deffeyes are based on data from x-ray diffraction (a method used in crystallography). They are not just pretty pictures but visualizations of scientific data derived directly from those data. Together with Kenneth Deffeyes's witty commentary, they offer a vivid demonstration of the diversity and beauty found at the nanometer scale.

CUSTOMER REVIEWS (Average Customer Rating: 4.0 based on 2 reviews)

Big book about little things by Robert J. Deffeyes (Georgetown, Texas)

5 Stars
October 22, 2009
GREAT coffee table book with beautiful illustrations. This is a readable book to help ordinary people understand a little about ordinary science if little things. Reading the work of astronomers with measurements of light years boggles the mind. Now you can have YOUR mind boggled by things measured in billionths of a meter. I guess that the publisher got so carried away with the thrill of reading about the nanometer world that they published it too close to nanosized. The beautiful illustrations would be great in a bigger format, maybe 8 by 12 coffee table size, but maybe the publisher has a smaller coffee table than I do.

Nice photos by A. Hall (Cambridge, England)

3 Stars
June 29, 2009
Having looked at this book, I was a little disappointed as whilst the photos of stuff from air to diamond were enlightening, I found the accoumpanying text rather less informative. I was expecting some data -packed work on the impact of nanoscale particles on the environment and living things. So this is not so much a good read, more a good look. It is essentially a catalogue of computer generated molecular structures. If this work shows anything, its that most stuff is just a bunch of atoms so in a sense most stuff is pretty much the same stuff. Its a good job that the nanoworld is invisible otherwise we'd all fall asleep.

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