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Powers of Ten

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The story of "Powers of Ten" dates back to 1957. A Dutch schoolteacher, Kees Boeke, published a book called Cosmic View - The Universe in 40 Jumps. It is out of print but can be read online. It is a journey in pictures from infinity to the nucleus of the atom. It's a lesson about scale. It starts with a picture of a girl. Subsequent pictures are taken further and further away until the outer limit of the galaxy is reached. The author then returns to the girl. The pictures that follow are taken closer and closer ending with the nucleus of a atom. At each stop, she is seen from a different perspective. How does she relate to things around her? How big are things?

Then, in 1977, Ray and Charles Eames made a film called Powers of Ten. It starts with a man in the park and moves outward into the universe then inward to the microscopic world of the man's hand. The progression of pictures can be seen by clicking on the numbers in the black squares on the right hand side. (This site requires Macromedia shockwave). The Eames Office promotes a special forum for thinking in terms of scale and holds a "Powers of Ten" day each October to promote viewing of ideas from an infinitesimal to a cosmic perspective.

A question of scale - Quarks to Quasars is another web site that journeys through the powers of ten - 42 powers to be exact. The author notes that the 42 pictures illustrate a universe that is estimated to be 13.7 thousand million years old, at least 2 x 1026 meters in diameter, and made up of quarks and electrons that are smaller than 10-16 meters. The journey starts with a quark and continues in a straight line into deep space.

Perspectives: Powers of Ten is a short activity to aid in the understanding and the ability to compare the size of objects in our world and the universe. The interactive Java tutorial the "Powers of Ten" is worth viewing.

So what is the point of all this? Scale. The word scale is a noun and can be defined as an ordered referenced standard. The book and film are meant to convey a sense of scale for distances. It is hard to comprehend very large distances such as how far away the Milky Way is. But by using the girl or the man on the beach as a reference or anchor, this distance begins to make sense. From the Eames' web site : a knowledge of scale gives us the perspective to see all things in terms of relative size. It gives us a sense of place in the universe and expands our thinking in non-linear ways.

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