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Magnifying by Powers of Ten
Ron Harwood observes: "Molecular Expressions at Florida State University has a view of Earth starting at 10 million light years and working it's way closer by "powers of ten" till you are at the smallest point scientists can go in the subatomic universe."
this story has been posted before.
There's a book that's been published that is pretty much the same thing, by MIT Physics Professor Philip Morrison and others. It can be found here.
oops! "their" s/b "there". Dang.
You know, I'm sure this story is a dupe, and I'm sure I've seen it before, but nonetheless, it's still pretty darned amazing to see the universe like that. The number of times you have to zoom out to see the Galaxy from the roof of the laboratory shows you just how small we really are. No wonder we haven't met any extraterrestrials yet, our society, our entire civilisation has literally no impact on even our own solar system, let alone anything further out. Definitely puts my 10AM deadline in to perspective.
For people interested primarily in astronomy, there's a similar thing here which gives a count of the number of stars at different zoom levels. Interestingly, there are only 33 stars within 12.5ly, but there are 250,000 within 250ly. I don't think that sort of distance will be beyond us in a few centuries, if we get our act together. That's an awful lot of exploring to do...
As a sidenote, I would have loved to be the undergraduate student with the digital camera who got that assignment for his final year project!
The original Powers of Ten video (by Charles and Ray Eames) is still the definitive version. I highly recommend it to anyone who likes this web version.
The original is one continuous zoom, from human-scale, all the way out, then al the way in, down to sub-atomic particles. There is narration and various clues to scale, which helps a lot.
It is a landmark film and holds up very well after all these years.
...anyone else catch the file :-)
For those who think they've seen this, the Air and Space Museum at the Smithsonian has had a similar film since (at least) the 1970's, but the Earth scene was a man sleeping on a bench after a picnic and the film (it was a film, not slides or static pictures) zoomed in on molecules in his hand.
I know other museums have shown this film, since I saw it in a display at the Science Museum of Virginia and found out I could buy a video of it in their giftshop.
they didn't go down to the superstring or brane level. i feel cheated.
I thought we had an answer to that question, or at least the Ultimate Question.
It's 42, isn't it?
Let me tell you... Watching this sort of thing on a 5 story screen just messes with your head... Going from the superclusters of superclusters of galaxies down to quarks, wow, it's undescribable.
The part that really gets you is looking at the sheer size of the universe and realizing how much of it we truly know.
Make me a friend and I'll mod you up
Turtles all the way down
This whole thing was very nicely animated in an IMAX movie called Cosmic Voyage. It was narrated by Morgan Freeman and the graphics and sound were amazing. If you have a nice home theater setup (too bad if you dont! =] ) get Cosmic Voyage from Netflix, turn it up and enjoy.
The fluidity of the animation from a quark to the edge of the known universe is what makes it amazing. So it ends up going further out than this one did.
So it's basically a device that shows the universe in its mind-boggling hugeness with an infinitely small dot-on-a-dot labelled "You Are Here"?
(The wording isn't exact, but I hope I got the gist of it)
Make me a friend and I'll mod you up
Sorry -- I had indended on leaving that at the end of my post, like a tag, but got distracted when my my call to tech support was suddenly answered after 45 minutes and I hit the submit by mistake.
I can't help but to think that the ultimate "design" of the Universe is something close to fractal based. When we understand the patterns at the most rudimentary level of the Universe, I think we'll see how those patterns are repeated, over and over, on bigger levels with slight alterations. It's kind of like the way an atom almost resembles a solar system. It's outdated, but there's a great story from the 40's or 50's called "He Who Shrank" about a lab assistant who gets fitted with a telemetry helmet by his boss, who uses a "shrink forumla" on him. As he shrinks, he falls into a block of dense material and the atoms are, to him, like solar systems, and he lands on the planets and keeps shrinking and repeating this over and over.
Whenever I see a Powers of 10 film, I can't help but to think of that story.
So, it's not exactly "news". I first saw this at least two years ago.
When i was a twelve year old schoolboy i read this book and was really fascinated. Same idea. /graf0z.
...planetary orbits weren't visible.
I stand corrected.
-- Mod me down. I am not a karma tart. ffs,gag
I have all the pictures saved as a slideshow and have seen them as the screen-saver for some years now.
What has never ceased to amaze me is that all the levels that were shown were part of a continuous reality but we have broken them into many almost independent fields of study. Chemistry, Biology, Astronomy, High Physics, Genetics, Meterology, Architecture, etc. All of these fields now seem to me to be just different colored lenses helping you catch one glimpse of the awesome reality. Putting on all lenses together at one time would give us the furthest view, but the last person who was said to have known everything that was there to be known has been dead a few centuries. So, for us now, being able to wear all the lenses at the same time is an impossibility. That is our limitation. And of course the real limitation is in the time available to us because if it were infinite we would have enough time to be able to wear all the lenses at least once. But in the current situation we can't; time is not infinite.
In addition, what gets me always is that at the starting (i.e most positive powers) and at the ending point (most negative powers) the nature of our imagination of them is very similar. In my mind I could easily switch some of the last images with some of the first images and not really see anything upset much. It is almost like that is the region where the positive and negative loops somehow mysteriously join back-to-back. It is as if after we see the Russian Doll like nature of the universe, we see that the innermost Russian Doll also actually contains the outermost Russian Doll. And then I compare my life to these Russian Dolls, and don't feel too bad. I guess, that's what I like about the Powers of Ten.
To see a world in a grain of sand, and then to step back and see the beach where the sand lies
I saw a better version of this on a big screen when I went to Disney World this Christmas vacation; it's running in Innovations in Epcot projected on a 20 foot square screen, part of a "nanoscale devices" exhibit.
... "smoothly" being a somewhat obvious computerized blend between satelite cameras to normal optics to electron microscope images... but it was at 30 frames a second, not seconds per frame like Florida's java applet.
It's not quite the Charles & Ray Earnes movie, since it starts out in space at ~10^9 (orbiting earth) then "smoothly" zooms in to ~10^-10 (electron level)
I saw a film that had this back in high school that looked like it was made in the 80's. I think the quality was a little better too.
It simply proves that oak tree is the most important thing in the universe.
I have misplaced my pants.
"Many Worlds Hypothesis". All mathematically consistent worlds exist from beginning to end, with varying distributions of stuff (matter, energy, whatever) and varying physical parameters and laws. It just so happens that only fairly remarkable worlds have the complexity to permit the evolution of lifeforms that can be astounded at the complexity of the world they are in. Were you looking for a Creator? Modern physics doesn't rule out that possiblity, but doesn't find one necessary.
Actually, Occam's Razor suggests that your theories not include entities which are unnecesary. Thus, if you can explain the Universe without sticking a Supreme Being in your theories, you're following Occam's advice.
Of course, just because Occam's Razor seems to favor one theory over another doesn't mean that theory is correct, so use it with a grain of salt.
Hey kids, there's only 5 days left 'til Yak Shaving Day!
It's because we float in a big blue ring around the sun. Now it all makes sense.
But my thought is that you can't explain the universe without a creator. The multiple worlds hypothesis still begs the question, "where did the multiple worlds come from?"
And I agree with you about Occam's Razor--you can imagine all sorts of scenarios where using Occam's Razor could lead you down the wrong path.
And including a creator begs the question, "Where did the creator come from?" An infinite regression either way. The difference is, we have evidence of at least one example of a Universe, but none of a Universal creator.
Where we disagree, then, is on the supposed "lack of evidence" of a creator. I and others like me see the evidence for one all around us, yet others (like yourself) apparently do not acknowledge the evidence. Fair enough.
I wonder how they got that picture showing the view of earth from 10M ly away.
Too bad the last stages are a bit crude.
The protons are shown as perfect spheres, and seem to contain thousands of quarks (instead of the usual 3).
See AIP
I've been looking for evidence - any evidence - of a creator for nearly 40 years (admittedly with a pretty sceptical eye) and I have seen none. Occam rules.
What a long, strange trip it's been.
was the high magnetics record field at 25 gauss. It too was posted twice, strangely enough. It is right there next door somewhere in the picture I guess though I have never seen it from that perspective. It would be more instructive to zoom in on teaching assistant housing which is also nearby. Seeing the native PHD candidates in their hovels, cooking over the glowing coals of rejected research papers . . . .
Any preoccupation with ideas of what is right or wrong in conduct shows an arrested intellectual development. (Wilde)
Check out this link. A guy at the Exploratorium (the sysadmin?) wrote this page. You plug in how big you want the Sun to be (e.g., 1 inch diameter), and it gives you the scale of the sizes/orbital radii for the planets, the size of a light year, speed of light, and others. I used it in a talk I gave. If you make the Sun the size of a golf ball, Pluto is a grain of sand at the other end of an (American) football field, and the nearest star is another golfball 450+ miles away!
I'd be more impressed if you could choose an arbitrary starting point. It _is_ an interactive Java app, after all!
Imagine, a little initial mouse nudge to the east, and you could zoom in on Paris Hilton! A little further left on frame 1, and you could view an alien civilization! And 10^12 times out of 10^12+1... you'd end up zooming in on empty space for the entire thing once it gets to 'planetary' scale.
Yep, I want me my Zoomable Universe[tm]!
A.
Ever hear of a group of scientists "accidentally" making a tree/plant/animal/anything of higher life form from just a bunch of chemicals? (expects to be moderated to nothingness)
Just another circular regression. What is the primary cause of the Universe:God? What evidence do you find for God: the Universe! Sometimes A just equals A.
No, it's not circular at all. The evidence for God is not conclusive, sure, but it is nonetheless compelling. I'm always astounded to what lengths some people go to come up to justify an atheistic worldview.
So trying to state that the design of the universe is a good indication that a creator exists is flamebait? Come on moderators, be serious!