Powers of Ten
Credit & Copyright:
Charles & Ray Eames
(Eames Office)
How different does the universe look on small, medium, and large scales?
The most famous short science film of its generation gives breathtaking comparisons.
That film, Powers of Ten, originally created in the 1960s, has now been officially posted to YouTube and embedded
above.
Please click the above arrow to see the nine minute movie for yourself.
From a picnic blanket
near Chicago out past the
Virgo Cluster of Galaxies,
every ten seconds the film zooms out to show a square a factor of ten times larger on each side.
The video then reverses, zooming back in a factor of ten every two seconds and ends up inside a single proton.
The Powers of Ten sequence is actually based on the book
Cosmic View by
Kees Boeke in 1957, as is a similar but mostly animated film
Cosmic Zoom that was also created in the late 1960s.
The changing perspectives are so
enthralling and educational that sections have been
recreated using more modern computerized techniques, including the first few minutes of the movie
Contact, and in a short digital video called
The Known Universe created last year for the
American Museum of Natural History.
Ray and husband Charles Eames, the film's creators, were known as quite visionary spirits and even invented
their own popular chair.