Cosmic View
Cosmic View: The Universe in 40 Jumps is a 1957 book by Dutch educator
Summary and themes
In his introduction Boeke says the work originated with a school project at his Werkplaats Children's Community in Bilthoven. The idea was to draw pictures that would include ever-growing areas of space, to show how the Earth is located in an unfathomably enormous universe. Boeke then writes that he realized the reverse process—creating graphics of tinier and tinier bits of reality—would reveal a world "as full of marvels" as the most gigantic reaches of outer space.
The result is a voyage outward and inward from the familiar human scale. The ordinary photograph of a schoolgirl and a cat proves to be the starting point for an insightful visit to levels of reality that can only be imagined, and about which little may be known. In his conclusion Boeke speculates that the imaginary voyage depicted may help "just a little" to make mankind realize the enormousness of the cosmic powers that the human race has begun to master.
Boeke injected some humor into the book. He puts a blue whale into his graphics, incongruously lying alongside the girl and her cat, to give an idea of relative sizes. In his voyage into the smaller realms of reality, he includes an Anopheles mosquito that looks like a creature from a fifties science fiction film.
Influence
Boeke's book attracted much attention and was included in
Boeke's essay/book is recognized in the credits of three short documentary films:
- Cosmic Zoom (1968) produced by the National Film Board of Canada
- Powers of Ten (1968, re-released 1977) by Charles and Ray Eames
- The IMAX film Cosmic Voyage (1996) produced for the Smithsonian Institution's National Air and Space Museum.
It is also the basis of the interactive iOS app Cosmic Eye (2012), whose developer has also made a three-minute video from it, also called Cosmic Eye (2012, re-released 2018).
See also
- Cosmic Zoom
- Earth's location in the universe
References
- Gateway to the Great Books, edited by Robert Maynard Hutchins and Mortimer Adler, Encyclopædia Britannica Inc. 1963, volume 8, pp. 597–644