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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!
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.
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.
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.