Re: Interesting visualization of the scale of cells

Randal <[email protected]> Wed, 18 Nov 2009 13:10:39 -0500
Newsgroups gmane.comp.infodesign.general
Message-ID <[email protected]>
"Plank scale" is of course meant to read "Planck scale".


On Nov 18, 2009, at 1:01 PM, Randal wrote:

> 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
>> _____
>>
>> Deborah Taylor-Pearce
>> [email protected]
>>
>>
>>
>>
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