Slashdot Mirror
Java Powers of Ten
WeeMan writes "Remember that cool video/film you might have seen in your high school science class "Powers of Ten"? Well Florida State University (FSU) has their own well done Java version of Powers of Ten. For those who have not seen it, basically it's a continuous zooming in of images by powers of ten, starting with galactic superclusters/walls and ending at the quantum scale. The FSU site also has some cool close up images of many chip designs here, Java virtual microscopy there, and plenty of other cool applets and microscopy images (like microscopic images of beer from around the world : )"
Hey! Using this technology, you might finally be able to see it!
Heh, I want to see the "powers of ten" movie centered on a nude sunbather... :) (Hey, this is Slashdot..)
But yeah, I remember the movie. IIRC it held the record for "longest contiunous zoom" or something...
This
I've always wondered, how do they get pictures millions of light years away from the Milky Way? Or even pictures of the Milky Way, for that matter? Obviously no terran space vessel could have taken it...
http://www.talknerdy.org
Some more microscopy pics of chips, concentrating on some of the funny things designers put on their layouts is at Silicon Zoo. Cartoon characters, signs, messages and a marriage dedication... :)
a grrl & her server
The Power of Ten video is the work of the late artists Charles and Ray Eames. It is available from the Eames Office.
I think it would be prudent to... um- we should consult him about this venture.
Am I the only person who saw this atleast two months ago? Hardly news.
scott
This is truly hot stuff!!! a java slideshow of pictures!! Forget e-trading and dot-com fakes. Let's not talk about developing programs or new fancy hardware.. no..
Stop the press!! there's a,,, GAAAASP,, java SLIDESHOW out on the web now. Holy cow!
It feels good to be part of the elite that gets this kind of information to discuss!
I don't care, my karma is fine. I'm waving the bird at you.
/^[A-Z0-9._%+-]+@[A-Z0-9.-]+\.[A-Z]{2,4}$/i
Wow - finally I'm starting to grasp the importance of having that 20Megs of Java stuff tacked on to my web browser. For tomorrow, I suggest someone write an article about a cool flash animation they stumbled across while they were otherwise wasting their time.
I was hoping I would be able to zoom out untill I saw the creation of the universe... but I suppose you cant have everything in life.
GoatPigSheep, the 3 most important food groups
well, you did say Java, didn't you?
-f
www.blackant.net
My eighth grade science teacher showed us that movie weekly and I never got tired of it. I think I need my own copy...
FoundNews.com - get paid to blog.,
this just makes me think about zooming in on things, and if it's technically possible (not today) to take a photo of say that tree and magnify it to see the structure of things inside it... i dunno, like a 200 gigapixel camera or something.
just a thought
It's Australian for Russian cubism, mate!
I have been pwned because my
(mark me as offtopic now) amazingly, something from here gets posted. man, i have to put up with some much shit from geeks b/c i go to FSU. well i see this building everyday on the way to the business building and its the biggest eyesore, relative to the other buildings, and thats why i like it.
------
[insert funny
Well, it has a full set of images over a logarithmic range, but I'm not sure I'd say its well done. It's really just a slide show with a Powerpoint-esque transition effect.
There are a number of slides that are quite bad transitions. Look at the 1 nanometer->1 angstrom transition. The 1 angstrom image bears no resemblance to the 1 nm image; the corners of the "zoom" rectangle from one image should correspond to the outer corners on the next image. Similar problems exist throughout the slides in space.
As I recall, one of the beautiful things with the movie is that the transitions are seamless; the zoom out was continuous, and you never really got the impression that the images must have been from different sources
Russ %-)
... and never, ever play leapfrog with a unicorn.
i read the faq from the link sites provided by WeeMan. i probably miss it. anyway, why somebody want to do it? it looks fun, i agree. other than that?
-- Sick F.a.q
My farovrit powers of ten are: 10^1 10^5 and oh, 10^0
It's cool on so many different levels... [bad pun intended]
Is this really true?
When he really dies, no one on slashdot is going to believe it.
Hey kids, there's only 5 days left 'til Yak Shaving Day!
LOL, sorry I've never seen that troll before....
The short answer is, I guess, you can't. Quantum objects like molecules, atoms, and sub-atomic particles will always be "invisible", as they are all much, much smaller than a wavelength of visible light, which is what we really define vision as. We can really only infer their existence from their indirect effects, which is the only way we know any of them are real. Besides, to actually "see" anything amounts to measuring the position and velocity of an object to as high an accuracy as the size of the object, so the Heisenberg uncertainty principle makes it impossible to see anything so small...
An attempt to actually zoom into a proton to see it using high-energy gamma ray photons would require a photon wavelength of less than 1 fm, or about 10^23 Hz. This gives a photon energy of roughly 2.5 GeV, which is comparable to the energies generated at the Fermilab or CERN particle accelerators. I guess this is probably enough energy to turn the proton into something else entirely even before you could see it. A similar attempt to view an atom would require a photon wavelength of 1 angstrom, a wavelength of about 10^18 Hz, and a photon energy of about 12 keV, quite enough to completely ionize the atom and strip away all of its electrons, leaving you with nothing to see. A similar calculation for the DNA strands at 10^-9 m gives an approximately 124 eV photon energy, which is also sufficient to ionize some of the molecules; you may be able to get a picture, but it will be a very hazy one (the best electron microscopy has been able to just barely make out the double helix structure of DNA).
Qu'on me donne six lignes écrites de la main du plus honnête homme, j'y trouverai de quoi le faire pendre.
Ah, stupid tricks with Google. BTW, CNN doesn't have anything on it so it's just a troll.
Sorry about the writing. Robot fingers, you know? Cliff Steele in DOOM PATROL #23
Here's the main website for the book/movie: http://www.powersof10.com
However, I think the difference between 10^13 and 10^14 is way too small. That is more like 2.3 instead of 10. Artistically, that can be considered as a 10, but to me, it only rises suspicion about the other ratios, i.e., what is the selected balance of artistic and scientific ratios. IMHO, to maintain credibility, the scale ratio should be very close to 10 between each two pictures.
-- Imperial units must die --
well, ok.. to nitpick.
:)
Two things.
First of all, they could have started further out than just the milky way galaxy. They should have presented the top level as the entire known universe and worked inward from there. Several orders of magnitude gone to waste on that one.
Second nitpick, 10 billion and 100 billion km don't match up. They don't zoom in by a factor of 10.
Third minor nitpick. The 10 light years zoom has too many stars. Perhaps they're simply showing background stars, but if that were the case, there would be background stars all the way up until the point that earth fully engulfed the frame. Still, only a minor nitpick.
-Restil
Play with my webcams and lights here
Remember that cool video/film you might have seen in your high school science class "Powers of Ten"?
What kind of group is slashdot pandering to? Video in high school would mean that you have to be very young. No wonder the lazy little kiddies are all over this site.z
Java brought me back in time...
I bought a new 2 GHz computer and when I run java on it it's as if I am running C++ on a 5 year old PII/266!
Now back to the dot com days I go to get RICH!
For example, we can't see IR light, it's too low frequency. None the less, you can get scopes that will translate it into something you can see.
So yes, in the strict sense you can't "see" an atom, but that doesn't mean that there isn't a way to visualize one.
I'm not sure, but it may have been a Canadian production. Anybody else remember this?
"E pur si muove!" - attributed to Galileo Galilei, 1564-1642
maybe he'd been browsing at +4.
-Restil
Play with my webcams and lights here
I want to set the focus where to zoom in, not always in the center, like on a electronic street map. Now that would be something really revolutionary! Discover the whole universe while sitting at home drinking a beer.
--
Karma 50, and all I got was this lousy T-Shirt.
This is an insult to the slashdot community ! Can you think two seconds before posting ?
The idea of an alien guy pointing a camera to a tiny litle planet 10 million lightyears away, and still managing to aim at ground (25 pc of the earth surface), on a living organism, is simply ridiculous. For me, all remaining credibility was lost when a well centered quark appeared on the screen.
Also, how could this guy be thinking in decimal system like us ? He probably thinks in base e or in base fibonacci !
More so, if we suppose that this altruistic guy sends it to earth via radio waves (oh no, I forget, he probably aims a "L.A.S.E.R" to us too !), it would have to travel for 10e6 years before reaching a LISTENING receiver. And last time I checked, SETI didn't find anything.
Get a clue !
"Powers of Ten" is definitely a classic science video, and the zoom effect is pretty good considering that it was made in 1968. Some of you may have seen "Cosmic Voyage", which is an IMAX film that came out a few years ago, narrated by Morgan Freeman. It's a bit more expansive in subject material than Powers of Ten, but it also contains a similar continuous zoom from the Earth out to a distance which shows the large-scale structure of the universe, and then back down to microsopic scales. This one is computer-generated. It's very cool. The video is available for sale if anyone's interested, and I think some IMAX theaters (especially ones in science museums) still show it.
Hey I thought that film was only for the remedial groups.
In kindergarten.
Yeah I read stuff here all the time, in fact, I browse at -1. I dunno, I've never seen that troll before.
If you look at 1x10^(15, 16, 17, 18) they look the same and in many other frames the stars look the same. However those stars could be so far away that even if you zoomed in they don't move. I know that it would be very difficult to photograph ourselves from that far out so those frames could be conceptual instead of actual. It still looks great though, and I always appreciate efforts to educate science over the web.
Why do people do this kind of stuff. Steven King is still very much allive
..........FULL STOP.
...that zoomed in on a globe (Planet Earth)
:)
:(
...then zoomed in on a country
...then zoomed in on a hill
...then zoomed in on a house
...then zoomed in on a window on the house
...then zoomed in on desk inside the window
...then zoomed in on a globe on the desk
...and then started all over again, with the globe of course being Planet Earth where the animation had started.
I've always thought it would make a cool screen saver but I can't find it anywhere
http://micro.magnet.fsu.edu/micro/gallery/computer s/computer.html (Bon Jovi piracy?)
Guitar music for guitarists. This is an outstanding album by Shawn Lane, technically speaking.
m s/ 715.html
http://www.xtrememusician.com/info/artists/albu
Yann
É que os desafinados também têm um coração
But last I read, the Milky Way was thought to be a bared spiral.
This guy, these guys, and most convincingly, these guys, seem to all agree.
--Jimmy has fancy plans; and pants to match.
It really ends with a molecular model, things this small really cannot be seen as the nature of photons become a limiting facotr.
Well, that was fun! And also, they use the metric system! I'm so glad.. I also noticed that Star Trek uses the metric system too. Maybe there's still hope for America? :)
I want tender love now!
Elkobim
OK, but let's credit the person who, I think, really originated the idea. When I was a kid, I was given a wonderful book called "Cosmic View: The Universe in Forty Jumps," by a Dutch schoolteacher named Kees Boeke. It was all drawings, with that wonderful Dutch surrealistic sense of humor--it is centered on a school courtyard in The Netherlands, which just happens to have a dead whale lying in it.
It came out in 1957.
There's really no question, the Eames movie and Morrison book are a "remake" of "Cosmic View." The film and book explicitly give credit to Boeke.
To my astonishment, I find that the book is available online at
http://www.vendian.org/mncharity/cosmicview/
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
...then check this out: The Universe within 15 billion Light Years - The Visible Universe, compared to 'only' 10 million! Not as flashy as the java one, but still pretty interesting.
Sure, I remember that film. It's the one where the camera travels across the galaxy in a couple of seconds, and then zooms out to show you the structure of the universe, right? I would like a camera like that -- one that could move many (thousand) orders of magnitude faster than the speed of light... !
http://www.jlab.org/div_dept/physics_division/GeV/ Pac18_meziani.pdf
If i read this correctly, they CAN.
Lets get down to brass tacks- this is an exercise in conceptual visualization. It's not actually what you see, but if you were 1 angstrom tall and the laws of physics were suspended, you would see this...
This is ever so important for high school and even college physics/engineering students. They might say "So what if my answer is off by a factor of 10? or a couple of factors of 10?"
This is an easy visualization between 10^25 and 10^15. When you were in high school could you grok Avogadro's number? I know I sure couldn't!
P.S.- if that "you should write your numbers in hex!" guy responds to this it's blood wars.
In the future, I would want to not be isolated from my friends in the Space Station.
What a waste of a mod point, to mod this offtopic. You suck.
This reminds me of the start of Contact. Although it stops halfway, it had a _much_ higher resolution, especially if viewed at a 70mm theater.
Well actually I don't recommend it, because it can cause your brain to implode.
At New York's Museum of Nat'l History there is an exhibit centered around a two-story-tall sphere. Around the sphere is a walkway with exhibits where they compare various sizes to the sphere.
At first, it's like the Total Perspective Vortex. They'll say things like (paraphrased) "If the sphere is the size of the known universe, then this teeny tiny speck is the galaxy you live in."
If you survive that, they get closer and closer to 1:1 size, then they move inwards and say things like "If the sphere is the size of a hydrogen atom, this speck is the size of the nucleus."
It was at that point that I realized that matter truly does equal energy, and that even matter is mostly empty space, but nanoseconds later my brain imploded. I now drive a bus for a living and talk quietly to myself. Perhaps you've seen me or many of my other museum visitors. This helps to explain why there are so many weirdos in NYC. It's not that they're mentally ill or homeless. It's just that they've been through the exhibit.
You dick gobbler, that's the point. It's called sarcasm, you cum aspirator.
Um...the images for 100 light years on down to 1 trillion kilometers (sequence of 4 images) are all the same image!
I suppose not much was lost, as there really isn't much IN this range, but I was at least expecting to see some representation of the Oort cloud.
Oh well.
In a programming language! On a computer! Quick, make sure everyone on slashdot hits this server, so they can see this wonderous invention!
What next, devices to see this in color? With lowercase letters? Input without punchcards?
Jeesh, a programming language is JUST A TOOL.
-Donut
Thank you so much, I've been looking for this reference for years!
When I first saw stills from the Eames and Morrison work, I kept looking for the girl in the chair holding a cat with a little bit of salt left on her hand from lunch, that the ant was getting ready to feast on.
I had encountered the book at a pubic library 25+ years ago and have been trying to get a copy of it for years, but could never remember the title or author.
I really enjoy Boeke's bemused captions to his drawings.
In the back of my mind I have sort of looked for a book that goes through the powers of 10. Can any one suggest any such books?
C
I don't know about you, but whoever moderated this as "informative" scares me.
My first impression was that the 'powers of 10' was going to be about how code size keeps increasing to perform the same function.
It was the 'java' tag that did it...
There are no shortage of precedents for Eames "Powers of 10" which was made in 1977.
The earliest is the other poster's mention of the Dutch teacher Kees Boeke's book from the 50's.
Every time I went to the Ontario Science Center starting when it opened in 1969 my favourite exhibition was a powers of 10 film that started at a man sleeping in a park beside an airport (plane on the right) and zoomed out to the universe then stopped and did an accelerated zoom back down (vertigo anyone?) until it reached the man and then did the slow zoom down to the "unimaginably dense nucleus of a a carbon atom".
If you don't want to repeat the past, stop living in it.
> but as he said, you need an insanely high powered "torch", which would destroy what you were measuring (well change it anyway)...
You're right, of course, but in the breaking of it you can figure out what state it was in to begin with. When you use enough power to blow off the electron cloud, you can measure what got blown off and bust out a computer to figure out the most likely state of affairs before you turned on the "lights". The same goes for demolishing subatomic particles. There's no way to "see" them without breaking them, but you can get a fairly accurate guess by watching how the pieces fly apart.
Virg
"...so many things to look forward to, I'm quite dizzy with anticipation
I bought this house and you know I'm boss
Ain't no h'aint gonna run me off
Powers of Ten
Powersof10.com and Eames Office - Powers of Ten
Quarks to Quasars
`Powers of Ten' scales (additional links)
The book at Amazon, Barnes & Nobel.
Cosmic View: The Universe in 40 Jumps, by Kees Boeke (1957)
Cosmic View
Cosmic View (another version)
A Powers of Ten variant (my own)
How Big Are Things? (comments encouraged)
Scaling the universe to your desktop
Other PoT presentations of length
Length
Orders of magnitude - Distance
Scales of Measurement (ASCII version) from Niel Brandt's Timelines and Scales of Measurement Page
- Mitchell Charity
That was in fact a Canadian production, sponsored by the National Film Board of Canada I believe. The piece was titled "Cosmic Zoom" I think and if I remember right it was made in the early 70's. I believe this predates the "Powers of 10" film this discussion is about. The kid in the fishing boat was actual film, and was combined with the cartoon imagery. For trivia's sake, the kid in the boat was on the Ottawa River, just behind the Canadian parliament buildings in Ottawa. I also seem to recall that the outward zoom went out past galactic clusters and superclusters.
Artificial intelligence or natural stupidity?
Guess which wrote this...
omg, this has to be one of the geekiest statements ever said ever.
when i was in highschool we HATED that video. even the teacher!
i tip my hat to you, i will forever be in awe of your infinite geekiness before which mine whimpers and tries to run away.
unbelievable. seriously.
Eames' "Powers of 10" - 1977
Ontario Science Center Black-and-White Powers of 10 - Showing since the center opened in 1969!
Not sure if they had it the last time I went (last summer) I had watch two kids madly runnning around doing what I did when I was their age.
Fantastic place!
If you don't want to repeat the past, stop living in it.
Am I the only guy who thought it was going to zoom in on Disneyworld?
They ripped off a 1960's National Film Board of Canada presentation "Cosmic Zoom"
Starts with a boy on a rowboat.
If you don't want to repeat the past, stop living in it.
I'm Sh ri< h4>nk ing!
Perhaps that was this:
??
It proved helpful to "clump" the powers. Into 1000x lumps. So 10^0 through 10^3 are shown together, 10^3 through 10^6, etc. Rather than having separate "Powers of Ten" pictures of 1, 10, 100, and 1000 meters, we can step off the page, and use the whole room. So standing in the "meter room", 1 meter people are 1 mm high ants, 10 meter buildings are 10 mm high, 100 meter skyscrapers are the size of 100 mm soda cans, and 1000 meter neighborhoods can fit on your desk top. The cost is things are less pretty - rather than consistently sized 10 cm pictures, one is now constrained to frequently inconvenient sizes. The classic reclining person is either life-size, or a millimeter high. The benefit is I can actually remember and use the sizes of things. The Earth is a blue marble, so it was ten to the seven meters. A largish marble, so between 1e7 and 2e7 meters. And it becomes much easier to compare sizes (the "meter room" building is the size of a soda can, so it's 1000x bigger than my real soda can, and 10^6 times bigger than my hair (which is also can-like -- pool "noodle" floats make a good model)).
You already have a feel for the rough size of things which you handle, things you can hold in your hands. Leveraging this, one can often get not only the order-of-magnitude size of something, but also a digit of precision (as with the 10 to 20 Megameters Earth estimate). Which makes this scheme great for doing Fermi problems! :)
So while there is a dusty copy of "Powers of Ten" on my bookshelf, on my wall is a 2 meter high, 12-point, Times-Roman "a". And there are a pile of pool noodle-float "hairs" against the door (100 mm x 1500 mm, so 100 micron by 1500 micron - so a few days growth). And I'm out of M&M red blood cells at the moment, but they make a good snack. And if someone says 30 mils, or 30 nanometers, or 30 light years, it means something concrete, visceral, and familiar.
I'm actually trying to export this concept using a web page,
How Big Are Things?.
It's a very rough draft. Comments would be most welcome.
- Mitchell N Charity
(Apparently "space aliens have infested the server", or this wouldn't be posted as Anonymous Coward...)
(I'm serious about this). Start at the most zoomed in state. Then run auto, and have it go backwards towards the "bigger picture". Now concentrate.
As you see the houses, neighborhood, country and planet imagine us at each others' throats, beating and killing our fellow humans. Imagine the armies and tanks assembling; the rockets launching, the nukes exploding; and all the destructive and malicious things we fire at each other. Think of all the crap that's floating in the air, and the disappearing plants and forests and fish, while the greedy sneers on our faces grow wider as that meaningless electronic blip on the monitor goes up, up, up.
Realize that right now we have the knowledge and the means, more than ever before, to help our fellow humans and to not screw up the spinning chunk of rock and water and the delicately balanced system that sustains all life.
As you see the solar system, the galaxy, and finally nothing but the stars reflect on just how utterly stupid all the ill on earth is.
Just think how dumb we're going to look when the aliens find us later, dead and rotting on our own filthy mess of a planet with our cold apelike hands still wrapped around each others' throats.
Mark me as flaimbait, but have you noticed that starting your post "Mark me as flaimbait" always prevents that from happening and usually will get you modded up. Mark me as flaimbait, I don't care. This seems to be true. Mark this as offtopic too. I don't care. Mod me down see if I care. I got lots of karma.
Democracy Now! - your daily, uncensored, corporate-free
> Doesnt that annoy heisenberg?
I'm not certain. 8)
Actually, it doesn't, since most of the math is probability. Again, remember that it's guesswork, but at least it's educated guesswork.
Virg