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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.
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
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.
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well, you did say Java, didn't you?
-f
www.blackant.net
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
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.
More like two years...
I saw this a long long time ago. I'm really surprised it made it again this much later. Oh well, still a cool read for those that have never seen it.
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I thought the plot was pretty one-dimensional.
I have been pwned because my
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.
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
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.
However, I think the difference between 10^13 and 10^14 is way too small. That is more like 2.3 instead of 10.
Yeah, but in astronomy 2.3 is on the order of 10.
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 !
I think I need my own copy...
My thought exactly. But, is it worth the $25 for the dvd? (you can follow the link to powersof10.com to buy it.)
Informative? It was linked to at the top of the page!
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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.
They have a copy at the local library here. I like to take it out once in a while, usually scooping the book(SciAm edition) with it. Definitely worth the walk down to the library, whereas the java applet sure ain't nothing to wait for.
I always liked the Eames' film. I find it comforting, while some people I know have found it to be a bit unerving(I think for them it's a bit like a feeling of vertigo). For people who have never given much thought to these ideas it's maybe like getting thrown into the deep end. I remember going through the book version with a friend and she insisted on going one step at a time. She needed enough time to digest the information and let it sink in. So we started at the middle and worked or way to either end one page getting turned each day. It was a very nice contemplative experience.
Personally, I find it provides a much needed reality check; it enhances my sense of place and perspective. And I can sure use that somedays.
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!
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... !
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.
That makes one of us, becuase I can't read that link at all!
(sure you posted it right?)
In the future, I would want to not be isolated from my friends in the Space Station.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
And eating the fairy cake you had been using in your Total Perspective Vortex.
Dyolf Knip
> 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