Movies - Powers of Ten

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	Movies - Powers of Ten

Powers of Ten is a 1977 short documentary film which depicts the relative scale of the Universe in factors of ten (see also Logarithmic Scale). It was written and directed by Charles and Ray Eames.

The film begins with an aerial image of a man reclining on a blanket; the view is that of one meter across. The viewpoint, accompanied by expositionary voiceover, then slowly zooms out to a view ten meters across ( or 10¹ m in standard form), revealing that the man is picnicking in a park with a female companion. The zoom-out continues, to a view of 100 meters (10² m), then 1 kilometer (10³ m), and so on, increasing the perspective—the picnic is revealed to be taking place near Soldier Field on Chicago, Illinois's waterfront—and continuing to zoom out to a field of view is 10²⁶ meters, or the size of the observable universe. The camera then zooms back in to the picnic, and then to views of negative powers of ten—10^-1 m (10 centimeters), and so forth, until we are viewing a carbon nucleus inside the man's hand at a range of 10^-18 meter.

The idea for the film appears to have come from the 1957 book Cosmic View by Kees Boeke.

The film has been deemed "culturally significant" by the United States Library of Congress and selected for preservation in the National Film Registry.

The film has inspired a science exhibit at the California Academy of Sciences, which was shown from June 1, 2002 to January 5, 2003.

There is also a 1984 book of the same title, by Philip Morrison and Phylis Morrison; it contains a sequence of pictures starting with the universe and moving in powers of ten down to subatomic sizes.

There are some errors in the film. What is shown as one square metre is actually somewhat more than that. When zooming out, the 10⁷ m rectangle fits snuggly around the Earth, when it should really be somewhat bigger (but when zooming back in it is shown correctly). And the stars are often shown as a fixed photograph that does not zoom out or in. This becomes more apparent when lines are drawn to show constellations.

Also, the film tries to show what was known at the time. Superstrings are not mentioned. Also, quarks are mentioned merely as a question, even though the concept was already accepted for about a decade at the time. Furthermore, subatomic particles are shown as spheres, but that is just one way to view them (waves are another).

An interesting aspect mentioned by Robbert Dijkgraaf is that when one zooms out into the universe one goes back in time and thus the farthest image, of the whole universe, is really one of the universe at the "time" of the Big Bang, when it was infinitely small. In this sense, the two extremes come together.

The opening scene was spoofed in the Simpsons episode, "On A Clear Day I Can't See My Sister" (going from 10²⁶ to 10^-18 to Homer's head)

For their Twisted Logic Tour in 2005 and 2006, the band Coldplay used Powers of Ten as the backdrop for their performance of The Scientist.

[ Visit the complete Wikipedia entry for Powers of Ten ]

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Movies - Powers of Ten

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