Powers of Ten

Powers of Ten is a 1977 short documentary film which starts out with a couple picnicking in a park. The camera then zooms out to view that the picnic is taking place near Chicago, Illinois's waterfront, marking where the size of the field of view is one meter, ten meters, 100 meters, 1 kilometer, and so forth while the Earth gets smaller and smaller. The zoom out stops when the field of view is 10²⁶ meters, or the size of the observable universe. The camera then zooms back in to the picnic. As the camera zooms in, in steps of tenfold magnification, we get to see smaller and smaller things in the picture, until we are viewing a carbon nucleus inside the man's hand.

It was written and directed by Charles and Ray Eames. The film has been deemed "culturally significant" by the United States Library of Congress and selected for preservation in the National Film Registry.

The film has inspired a science exhibit at the California Academy of Sciences, which is showing from June 1, 2002 to January 5, 2003.

There is also a 1984 book of the same title, by Philip and Phylis Morrison; it contains a sequence of pictures starting with the universe and moving in powers of ten down to subatomic sizes.

See orders of magnitude for Wikipedia's rendition of the idea behind the film and the book.

External link

• For more on the exhibit, see the official site