Meet-the-Author Recording with Jason Chin
The Universe in You: A Microscopic Journey |
Jason Chin introduces and shares some of the backstory for creating The Universe in You: A Microscopic Journey.
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Jason Chin: Hi. My name is Jason Chin, and I am the author and illustrator of The Universe in You: A Microscopic Journey. This book takes the reader into the world of the very small, starting with a character, looking at familiar things, like birds and butterflies, and gradually zooming in closer and closer, looking at cells and molecules and atoms and, finally, the very smallest things we know of, elementary particles.
I'll tell you a story about making this book that really helped me start to understand how small cells and the components of cells are. I got to visit the electron microscope lab at the University of Vermont and see how these microscopes work. My neighbor, who worked at the lab, showed me how she ran the microscopes.
To begin with, she had to prepare the thing we were going to look at. In this case, it was a tiny bit of nerve tissue. I think it was from a mouse. And this sample was so small, I could barely see it. She had to use tweezers made from eyelashes to pick it up. But once it was put into the microscope, we were able to zoom in, and in, and in, and in, and see all the different parts of the cells. It was incredible to realize how much was inside that tiny sample that I could barely see with my own eyes.
Making this book, for me, was a journey because I discovered all of these amazing facts, not just about how small these very small things are, but about what we are made of. Did you know there are more cells in your body than all of the galaxies in the observable universe? Did you know that all living things are made up of mostly the same elements, and that all the physical matter in the universe, from stars, to planets, to you, is made up of the same handful of particles? You truly do carry connections to the entire universe inside your body.
Now, I'm going to introduce a spread, it's actually a series of spreads, from The Universe in You: A Microscopic Journey.
This series of pictures starts towards the end of the book with the phrase, "Elementary particles are the building blocks of all physical matter." And these pictures show how the particles make atoms, which make molecules, and the molecules combine to make cells, and the cells form the bodies of living things, like whales and birds and you and me.
So, these three pictures go one after the other. And if you were to take them out of the book and put all three pictures next to each other, they actually form one, single, long image. It's called a triptych, three paintings that go together.
Now, in the book, you might not notice it because they're on separate spreads, and you look at them one at a time, as you turn the pages. But if you look closely, from one to the other, you can see how they all line up. And they're actually three parts of one, single picture.
This Meet-the-Author Recording with Jason Chin was exclusively created in November 2022 by TeachingBooks with thanks to Holiday House.