Worlds Unfolding packs 12 centuries of Huntington science into five themed volumes

The Huntington Library in San Marino, California holds research papers, natural-history volumes, photographs and ephemera that trace humans' pursuit of knowledge over centuries. Worlds Unfolding: Science on the Page, published by Princeton University Press, turns that archive into a five-volume set spanning the tenth century to today, with more than 625 illustrations and an introduction by engineer and PBS personality Bill Nye.

The set comprises volumes titled Above, Below, Within, Beyond and Alive, presented together in a slipcase — an organizing idea that gives conceptual direction to material as varied as eighteenth-century anatomy studies, aeronautic engineering, natural history, electricity, space, geology and flight. Compiled by Jennifer A. Watts, Daniel Lewis, Joel A. Klein and Natalie Lawler, it reads as one continuously unfolding quest rather than a museum catalogue.

Among the images are a double-exposure portrait of Nikola Tesla sitting calmly beside an active Tesla coil, Eadweard Muybridge's motion studies that first used photography to record the passage of time, and Roy Knabenshue's passenger dirigible taking off over Pasadena. Aviation pioneer Ruth Rowland Nichols appears beside her Lockheed Vega from 1931, the year she became the first woman to hold simultaneous international records in altitude, speed and distance.

Worlds Unfolding will be released on 10 October 2026, with pre-orders open through Bookshop. The project's wager is that twelve centuries of archival documents can be presented as a single story about how humans tried to know the world.