If -- A Mind-Bending New Way of Looking at Big Ideas and Numbers
David J. Smith
Kids Can Press
Pub Date Aug 1 2014
The facts and figures in “If” could easily be overwhelming if they were not scaled down to manageable and familiar size.
This book is an offshoot of the author’s previous book “If the World Were a Village” based on the popular email about the world’s population scaled down to a group of 100 people.
In this new book, the author considers everything large from planets to the wealth of the world. Each turn of the page brings a new and interesting fact made intelligible.
But sometimes the constant shifting of scales is a bit mind-numbing. For instance, in the section on planets, the Earth is considered as the size of a baseball, a grain of salt, and a grapefruit. The rubber band stretching of scales is a little bewildering in a short number of pages.
The book has a list of sources, books and web sites, but they are general -- no one fact is backed up with a direct source. Footnotes just aren’t cool I guess. Sometimes there are errors, for instance when we are told that the Hubble Space Telescope can only see 3,000 galaxies. The real number is in the billions, but this editing error made it into the first edition.
Other times the sense of scale is warped. For example, the number of species of living things is compared instead of the actual mass -- the living biomass of bacteria actually exceeds all the tonnage of plants and animals combined -- and yet the “species tree” only has 6 leaves for bacteria compared to 154 leaves for just plants.
Sometimes the charts use tricks to incorrectly imply certain stats. In the case of life expectancy shown by footprints in the sand, the length of the paths is misleading because the paths are slanted, and do not start at zero.
This book is a great place to start, and teaches an important lesson -- that big numbers and ideas can be understood by scaling. I look forward to an updated second edition with more careful fact-checking.
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