The sumptuous new coffee table book The Zoomable Universe: An Epic Tour Through Cosmic Scale, From Almost Everything to Nearly Nothing, written by Caleb Scharf and illustrated by Ron Miller and 5W Infographics, arrives at a special time in human history when we are experiencing rapid scientific discovery, but also at a cosmically special time when the universe itself is as accessible as it ever has been or will be to science.

The book revisits the stepwise journey through nature’s scales that has long served as a hook in scientific exposition — it was notably employed in Robert Hooke’s 1665 best-seller Micrographia and in the acclaimed 1977 short film Powers of Ten. But science keeps progressing, and our picture of the Russian-doll cosmos has sharpened dramatically in the past four decades. “What we wanted to do is update the material,” Scharf, an astrobiologist and planetary scientist at Columbia University, told Quanta. Referring to Powers of Ten as an inspiration, he added that “doing it in a printed book slows things down, in a good way.”

Packed with bleeding-edge facts, vivid prose and gorgeous illustrations, the book takes readers from a wide-angle view of the observable universe at 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 meters across to a subatomic picture of space in 0.00000000000000000000000000000000001-meter increments. Along the way, we see some scales filled with stuff, others that appear empty, and still others where the universe looks strikingly similar across huge differences in scale. “Little bits of it look like the big bits,” Miller said.

But we should count ourselves lucky; there have not always been 62 orders of magnitude of universe to explore, and there won’t always be. As Scharf explained, “If you turn the clock back far enough to the Big Bang, obviously there was a time when the number of scales that were causally connected were fewer, and space itself was smaller.” Likewise, “if you extrapolate 100 billion years into the future, assuming the current accelerating expansion, it will be essentially impossible for us to see anything much beyond our galaxy or our local group of galaxies.” Scharf said this seems to mean we’re living at a special time. And he wondered, “Would someone in the future be able to figure out how the universe works?”

Selected illustrations and lightly edited excerpts from The Zoomable Universe follow.