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Powers of Ten (film)

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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 and order of magnitude). It was written and directed by Charles and Ray Eames. 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, 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 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.

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. Superstrings are not mentioned at all and quarks are mentioned merely as a question, even though the concept had been accepted for approximately a decade at the time. Furthermore, subatomic particles are shown as spheres, which is actually 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.

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.

A very similar film called Cosmic Zoom was made in 1968.

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, Will Wright mentioned that his game title Spore was inspired by this film.

See also

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