Book; A short history of nearly everything

One of my key interests is physics, more specifically astrophysics and so this book immediately becomes my favorite of the three available.

The book consists of essentially an almost 700 page trip through the history of everything, glancing quickly over the very early history of the universe and focussing on 18-20th century sciences, keeping a mostly linear storyline however following individuals lives until their deaths, and then proceeding to jump back a short amount of time to explore other influential figures at the time.

There is a number of very valuable visual metaphors described in the book that present interesting photography, typography, and illustration. one of these appears very early in the book, taking the universe and reducing to a table with a black cloth draped over it and covered in salt grains. The overall informative yet playful nature of the book might support something like this, serving as an almost “non-scientist guide to complex sciences”.

Another metaphor opportunity is the “Journey of the atom”. At an early point in the book, the author describes atoms as an indestructible force that go around and become different things throughout time, and that over the course of the billions of years that the universe has existed, atoms that have been part of millions of different things all come together to form you, for an incredibly short time span of only 650,000 hours, and then go off to become another thing.

As well as this, the book is only a history of nearly everything, so I think that purposely removing some elements from the cover, simple and quite cliche ways to do this would be to remove small corners of the type and such so that it can still be read, yet it has not yet all been discovered.

The book all being about a journey does open up an idea of placing the title in such a way to that all of the tails and drops of the letterforms ligature together vertically within the center of the page to form a long line, this long line can then be annotated and illustrated to become a sort of rough timeline of the universe.

The book also follows the stories of many individuals so maybe a large family tree type idea or trying to include many people’s faces however I worry that this will take away from the more casual and fun narrative that the book seems to portray.

Since the author is so set on simplifying that which is already out there, it is a potential idea to take an existing book cover (Brief History of Time???) and create a colourful, simplified and more universally understood version of it.

Tip of the iceberg, but more than that, it’s more like were wading around in an ankle-deep pool just realizing that there’s water in it while there’s an ocean beside it that we know nothing about.

Describes a number of planets in the universe equivalent to a number of atoms in a finger. universe on top of every finger.

Long continuous line expelling out from a black explosion, traveling down the page wiggling and changing direction, visibly struggling to end on a small symbol/sign that it has arrived at where we are in history now.

A pop-out earth building kit