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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."
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.
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.
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.
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
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
that's correct. That was a year and a half ago, though, so maybe new people will see it.
We recently had heard in the office over one of the Yellow Machine that's made by Anthology Solutions.
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!
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
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!