Everything about Powers Of Ten totally explained
Powers of Ten is a
1977 short
documentary film written and directed by
Charles Eames and his wife,
Ray. The film depicts the relative
scale of the
Universe in factors of ten (see also
logarithmic scale and
order of magnitude). The film is a modern adaptation of the 1957 book
Cosmic View by
Kees Boeke---and more recently is the basis of a new book version. Both adaptations, film and book, follow the form of the Boeke original, adding color and photography to the black and white drawings employed by Boeke in his seminal work. (Boeke's original concept and visual treatment is all too often uncredited or insufficiently credited in contemporary accounts.)
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 by
Philip Morrison, then slowly zooms out to a view ten meters across (or 10
1 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 kilometre (10³ m), and so on, increasing the perspective—the picnic is revealed to be taking place near
Soldier Field on
Chicago's lakefront—and continuing to zoom out to a field of view of 10
24 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're viewing a carbon nucleus inside the man's hand at a range of 10
-18 meter.
In 1998,
Powers of Ten was selected for preservation in the United States
National Film Registry by the
Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant."
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 10
7 m rectangle fits snugly around the
Earth, but the Earth should really be somewhat bigger (when zooming back in, it's shown correctly).
The film is also limited to what was known at the time of its production:
Quarks are mentioned merely as a question, even though the concept had been accepted by much of the scientific community for approximately a decade at the time.
An interesting aspect mentioned by
Robbert Dijkgraaf is that when one zooms out into the universe the scene viewed goes back in time (as a result of the visual delay of light travelling over great distances) 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 of size come together.
Related works and references in pop culture
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.
There are similar films called
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 couch gag for
The Simpsons episode, "
The Ziff Who Came to Dinner" (going from 10
26 to 10
-16 to Homer's head, to which Homer says, "Wow!"), and has been repeated twice with different dialogue on "
On a Clear Day, I Can't See My Sister" (where Homer says, "Cool!" after the scene returns to the living room and Kang and Kodos can be heard laughing) and "
Eternal Moonshine of the Simpson Mind" (where Homer says "Weird!" after the scene returns to the living room).
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 and earlier at the 2005
GDCe,
Will Wright mentioned that his most recent game title at that time,
Spore, was partially inspired by Powers of Ten.
At the ending of
Men in Black, the camera pulls out showing that the universe is one of many marbles in an alien's bag, an intergalactic spoof of this.
The opening of the film
Contact is a
Powers of Ten-style montage that takes the viewer from Earth to the edge of the universe before ultimately resolving into the pupil of the main character's eye.
Musician
Shawn Lane has an album entitled "Powers of Ten".
Terry Pratchett's book
The Bromeliad Trilogy: Wings from 1990 begins with a mental exercise of zooming-in sequence, starting with the entire universe and focusing on a pair of eyes.
Excerpt from the book
The film is shown annually at the orientation lecture of the
Columbia University Science Honors Program.
Strip 271 of the web comic
xkcd,
Powers of One, references
Powers of Ten as background.
An unreleased advertisement for Apple's Mac OS X 10.2, "Jaguar," is similar to
Powers of Ten.
"Jaguar - Touching"Further Information
Get more info on 'Powers Of Ten'.
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