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Magnifying by Powers of Ten

Posted by Cliff on from the drill-down-from-macro-to-micro dept.

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."

5 of 76 comments (clear)

  1. Wheee... by Ianoo · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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!

    1. Re:Wheee... by Otter · · Score: 4, Insightful
      Also, this crew at Florida State deserves credit for making an arcane corner of engineering into something widely interesting. I don't believe any of their technology is especially novel (could easily be wrong, though) but they have a great sense of how to use it to do fun things and popularize the results in a fun way. I even own one of their neckties.

      But, yeah, it's beyond a dupe. Taco linked everything on their site back when this was a one man show, and Hemos pretty much duped them all in the first couple of months after he joined up. (Misuse of apostrophes has been a constant from the Chips and Dips posts to today's.) Still, it's fun, they seem able to take a Slashdotting and it's worth relinking everything they have once a year.

      --
      What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
  2. Saw It At The Smithsonian by TheWanderingHermit · · Score: 2, Insightful

    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.

  3. Re:Hitchhiker's guide by daeley · · Score: 2, Insightful

    You are of course referring to the Total Perspective Vortex, which all extremists of any sort should be forced into.

    Which reminds of my favorite sig: "Death to all extremists!" :)

    --
    I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser gate.
  4. Quarks by ByteSlicer · · Score: 2, Insightful

    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