Many of the graphics are impressive realizations of the differences in size that lie hidden from our normal view. 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 movie.īoeke's book attracted much attention and was included in Mortimer Adler's Gateway to the Great Books (1963) series. 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 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.īoeke injected some humor into the book. 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. The result is a voyage outward and inward from the familiar human scale. 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 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. In his introduction Boeke says the work originated with a school project at his Werkplaats Children's Community in Bilthoven.
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