Re: Interesting visualization of the scale of cells

One of the most interesting things to me about the Powers of Ten movie  
has always been how clearly it shows the vast differences in the sizes  
of structures in the universe. When you "leave" the  solar system at  
10^13 here you go through five powers of ten before you even see the  
next, neighboring star, and our galaxy is 10^21 (100,000,000 times  
larger than the solar system). There are no basic structures except  
loose star clusters in between the solar system and the galaxy.

When you leave the galaxy here, you go through two powers of ten  
before you even see any other galaxies, and it is five powers of ten  
between the size of a galaxy and the size of the visible universe  
( ~10^26 meters), though this scale is not shown here (as the universe  
has effectively aged about 10 billion years since this movie was made  
in the 1960's).

Similarly, on the other end of scale, when you "enter" the outer  
electron shell of the atom at 10^-9 it takes five powers of ten till  
the nucleus fills the screen at 10^-14. It is not, of course, proven  
or visualizable, but string theory postulates that strings have to be  
close in size to the Plank scale (or the smallest possible unit of  
space) which is 1.6 x 10^-35 meters.

-- Randal


On Nov 15, 2009, at 7:47 PM, Deborah Taylor-Pearce wrote:

> Randal,
>
>> Uses zooming in flash:
>>
>> http://learn.genetics.utah.edu/content/begin/cells/scale/
>>
>> Reminiscent of the Eames' Powers of 10:
>>
>> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A2cmlhfdxuY
>
> Thanks for passing these on (feeds my ongoing obsession with the
> difficulties of representing changes of scale in human terms ;-).
>
> Deborah
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> Deborah Taylor-Pearce
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