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Space Science

Magnifying by Powers of Ten 76

Posted by Cliff 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."
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Magnifying by Powers of Ten More

Magnifying by Powers of Ten

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  • Book on the subject (Score:4, Informative)

    by Theory of Everything ( 696787 ) on Wednesday January 07, 2004 @03:20PM (#7905104)
    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 [amazon.com].

  • Wheee... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Ianoo ( 711633 ) on Wednesday January 07, 2004 @03:21PM (#7905114) Journal
    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 [anzwers.org] 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!

    • Re:Wheee... (Score:3, Interesting)

      by Zathrus ( 232140 )
      I'm sure I've seen it before

      Read the webpage. It's based off Dutch engineer and educator Kees Boeke Powers of Ten idea, which was later turned into a film by Charles and Ray Eames. You probably saw the film in grade school (in the US at least) or at some science/tech museum. It's a pretty popular piece.

      And yes, I thought the same thing. Until I read the webpage.
      • I've definately seen that webpage before. Including the little slider where you can change the speed that its running at.

        The page hit counter has been running since 1999.. so its not that unlikely.

    • Re:Wheee... (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Otter ( 3800 ) on Wednesday January 07, 2004 @03:36PM (#7905267) Journal
      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.

      • But, yeah, it's beyond a dupe.
        Way, way, way beyond a dupe. There was a dead-tree version of this published nearly fifty years ago. It's cool that it's on the web, but it isn't original.
        • Say what?
          And where did they get the images to do this 50 years ago?
          • And where did they get the images to do this 50 years ago?

            What do you think, these are actual photographs from the edge of the universe?

            • Um, no, not all of them.
              But most of them are real photos.

              50 years ago they didn't even have photos of the earth from space of any sort...so the original must have been pretty much entirely a fictional work of art, where as this one, for the most part, uses real images.

          • Re:Wheee... (Score:3, Informative)

            by DerekLyons ( 302214 )
            IIRC most of the images were airbrushed. (I used to own a copy of the book, probably still do, but my library is, um, disorganized.) Check the page linked in the article at the top (the page with the animations), the full story is down towards the bottom.
      • was the high magnetics record field at 25 gauss. It too was posted twice, strangely enough. It is right there next door somewhere in the picture I guess though I have never seen it from that perspective. It would be more instructive to zoom in on teaching assistant housing which is also nearby. Seeing the native PHD candidates in their hovels, cooking over the glowing coals of rejected research papers . . . .
        • It would be more instructive to zoom in on teaching assistant housing which is also nearby. Seeing the native PHD candidates in their hovels, cooking over the glowing coals of rejected research papers . . . .

          Oh, believe me, I'm _extremely_ familiar with that aspect of science. I watch the Mars broadcasts and think, "Now, _that's_ something cool to work on. Although it still probably sucks 99.9% of the time."

    • Re:Wheee... (Score:2, Funny)

      by NanoGator ( 522640 )
      "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."

      Simultaenously across the planet, men's legs cross.
    • " 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.".

      Considering this, it's weird that some scientist who study earthquakes and vulcanoes believe that they can control Nature and the earth. T

  • See the Eames version (Score:5, Informative)

    by david94133 ( 461088 ) <david DOT commer ... tares-sf DOT com> on Wednesday January 07, 2004 @03:23PM (#7905128)
    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.
  • ...anyone else catch the file :-)

  • Saw It At The Smithsonian (Score:3, Insightful)

    by TheWanderingHermit ( 513872 ) on Wednesday January 07, 2004 @03:25PM (#7905148)
    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.
  • Let me tell you... Watching this sort of thing on a 5 story screen just messes with your head... Going from the superclusters of superclusters of galaxies down to quarks, wow, it's undescribable.

    The part that really gets you is looking at the sheer size of the universe and realizing how much of it we truly know.

  • Hmmm.... (Score:3, Informative)

    by _RiZ_ ( 26333 ) on Wednesday January 07, 2004 @03:33PM (#7905235) Homepage
    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.

  • Hitchhiker's guide (Score:4, Funny)

    by sahonen ( 680948 ) on Wednesday January 07, 2004 @03:34PM (#7905248) Homepage Journal
    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)

    • Re:Hitchhiker's guide (Score:3, Insightful)

      by daeley ( 126313 ) *
      You are of course referring to the Total Perspective Vortex [fscked.org], which all extremists of any sort should be forced into.

      Which reminds of my favorite sig: "Death to all extremists!" :)
      • You are of course referring to the Total Perspective Vortex, which all extremists of any sort should be forced into.
        Why bother building such a thing. All you need is an island. Dump all the extremists on it and they'll annihilate each other.

        (This is because of the principle of supersymetrie. For every extremist there is an equaly hatefull anti-extremist. e.g. the White suppremist and the anti-white suppremist, better know as the Muslim fundamentalist)
      • I went into it once. It was nice to find out what a hoopy frood I really am!
    • Hey, the universe is a pretty neat place. Didn't I tell you baby? I am Zap... WolfWithoutAClause!

      (With apologies to Douglas Adams)

  • Comment removed based on user account deletion

  • Looks familiar ... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by graf0z ( 464763 ) on Wednesday January 07, 2004 @03:46PM (#7905362)
    When i was a twelve year old schoolboy i read this [amazon.com] book and was really fascinated. Same idea. /graf0z.

  • & I thought... (Score:4, Funny)

    by jantheman ( 113125 ) on Wednesday January 07, 2004 @03:50PM (#7905397)
    ...planetary orbits weren't visible.
    I stand corrected.

  • I have all the pictures saved as a slideshow and have seen them as the screen-saver for some years now.

    What has never ceased to amaze me is that all the levels that were shown were part of a continuous reality but we have broken them into many almost independent fields of study. Chemistry, Biology, Astronomy, High Physics, Genetics, Meterology, Architecture, etc. All of these fields now seem to me to be just different colored lenses helping you catch one glimpse of the awesome reality. Putting on all le

  • I saw a better version of this on a big screen when I went to Disney World this Christmas vacation; it's running in Innovations in Epcot projected on a 20 foot square screen, part of a "nanoscale devices" exhibit.

    It's not quite the Charles & Ray Earnes [powersof10.com] movie, since it starts out in space at ~10^9 (orbiting earth) then "smoothly" zooms in to ~10^-10 (electron level) ... "smoothly" being a somewhat obvious computerized blend between satelite cameras to normal optics to electron microscope images... but i
  • I saw a film that had this back in high school that looked like it was made in the 80's. I think the quality was a little better too.

  • It simply proves that oak tree is the most important thing in the universe.
  • It's because we float in a big blue ring around the sun. Now it all makes sense.
  • I wonder how they got that picture showing the view of earth from 10M ly away.

  • Quarks (Score:2, Insightful)

    by ByteSlicer ( 735276 )
    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 [aip.org]

  • Javascript Scale Model of the Solar System (Score:3, Interesting)

    by spanklin ( 710953 ) on Thursday January 08, 2004 @12:07AM (#7910386)
    Check out this link [exploratorium.edu]. 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!
  • I'd be more impressed if you could choose an arbitrary starting point. It _is_ an interactive Java app, after all!

    Imagine, a little initial mouse nudge to the east, and you could zoom in on Paris Hilton! A little further left on frame 1, and you could view an alien civilization! And 10^12 times out of 10^12+1... you'd end up zooming in on empty space for the entire thing once it gets to 'planetary' scale.

    Yep, I want me my Zoomable Universe[tm]!

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