Powers of Ten

How different does the universe look on small, medium, and large scales? The most famous short science film of its generation gives breathtaking comparisons. This film, which wasoriginally created in the 1960s, has now been officially posted to YouTube and embedded above. Watch the nine minute movie for yourself, it's amazing. 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.