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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. Book on the subject by Theory+of+Everything · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.

  2. 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.

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  3. See the Eames version by david94133 · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

  4. & I thought... by jantheman · · Score: 4, Funny

    ...planetary orbits weren't visible.
    I stand corrected.

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