Monday, 24 August 2009 13:52

 A brilliant short film made more than 40 years ago reveals both the enormous scale of the universe and the stunning detail of the cells that comprise life within it.

‘Powers of Ten’ is a great film made by  Ray Eames and her husband Charles Eames in 1968. It starts with a man relaxing in a Chicago park then zooms out step-by-step right to the edge of the universe before flying back into the microscopic world inside his hand.

Although it's over 40 years old it’s still a truly inspirational video - It's always hard to picture how incredibly mind-blowingly big the universe really is, how small you are in it, and how we're all made of infinitesimally small building blocks. This film does a fantastic job at doing just that!

Transcript

This video starts with the one metre picnic patch and then uses the powers of ten to move out through each 'order of magnitude' through the universe. Every ten seconds another zero is added to the distance, from 1 to 10 to 100 etc.

They've got a great picture of their original plan of what would be shown at each power of 10 and how they could film it.

Here are some of the powers of ten:

10^0m = 1 metre

10^3m = 10 x 10 x 10 = 1000 metres = 1 kilometre - you can see the whole city

10^9m = 10 x 10 x 10 x 10 x 10 x 10 x 10 x 10 x 10 = 1000000000 = 1 billion meters - you can see the moon's orbit around Earth

10^16 = about 1 light year - you're almost at Alpha Centauri, the closest star system to the Solar System

Then back down into the guy's hand

10^-3 = 1 / (10^3) = 1 / 1000 = 0.001 metres = 1 millimetre - just under his skin

10^-5 = 0.00001 metres - this is known as 10 microns, about the size of a lymphocyte, a type of white blood cell essential as part of our immune system

Related links

See all the powers of ten

The original plan for the video

Nickelodeon magazine's Powers of 10 game

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