Powers of Ten

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Powers of Ten is a 1977 short documentary film written and directed by Charles Eames and his wife, Ray. The film depicts the relative scale of the Universe in factors of ten (see also logarithmic scale and order of magnitude). The idea for the film appears to have come from the 1957 book Cosmic View by Kees Boeke.

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 expository 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's waterfront—and continuing to zoom out to a field of view of 10²⁴ 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 film has been deemed "culturally significant" by the United States Library of Congress and was selected for preservation in the National Film Registry in 1998.

1 Errors, omissions, and commentary
2 Related works and references in pop culture
3 See also
4 External links

[edit] Errors, omissions, and commentary

There are some errors that occur at various points in the film. For instance, what is shown as one square meter is actually somewhat more than that at times. When zooming out, the 10⁷ m rectangle fits snugly around the Earth, but the Earth should really be somewhat bigger (when zooming back in, it is shown correctly.)

The film is also limited to what was known at the time of its production: Quarks are mentioned merely as a question, even though the concept had been accepted for approximately a decade at the time.

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.

[edit] Related works and references in pop culture

There is also a 1982 book of the same title, by Philip Morrison and Phylis Morrison (Philip narrated the film). It contains a sequence of pictures starting with the universe and moving in powers of ten down to subatomic sizes.

There are similar films called

Cosmic Zoom (1968) which was based on an essay called Cosmic View.
Simply Atomic (1972) based upon an outre comic fanzine.
Cosmic Voyage (1996) [1] an IMAX film.

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

The opening scene was spoofed in the Simpsons episode, "The Ziff Who Came to Dinner" (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.

In May of 2006 at E3 and earlier at the 2005 GDCe, Will Wright mentioned that his most recent game title at that time, Spore, was partially inspired by Powers of Ten.

To illustrate the details of the fictional universe Tryslmaistan (setting for the webcomic Unicorn Jelly), author and artist Jennifer Diane Reitz used a variant on the concept.

At the ending of Men in Black, the camera pulls out showing that the universe is one of many marbles in an alien's bag, an intergalactic spoof of this.

Musician Shawn Lane has an album entitled "Powers of Ten".