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Update to Planet Waves: Nothing but Zooms

Posted 8/22/2011 12:08 AM by David Grinspoon | Comments

zooms

Science has shown us the largest and smallest of structures, situating us in size. We humans exist at a scale roughly halfway (at least on a logarithmic scale) between the largest and smallest structures in the universe. A human is, to an astronomer, a meter in length. The universe is, apparently, about 10 to the 27th times larger. And the smallest length that seems to have any meaning to our present physics (though nobody seems to know what that meaning is...) something called the Planck length, is about 10 to the 35th times smaller. How well can we imagine that which we can know by measurement and calculation but not really see, which we can conceive but not perceive? We can precisely define a light year or an angstrom but, other than knowing they are ridiculously large or small, can we really have a feel for things so far outside our direct experience?

And what about time? Maybe you can fathom 1000 years, a mere 10 or 20 human lifetimes, but can you really picture the passage of a million years, 10 billion? Analogies help, of course. Carl Sagan's cosmic calendar compressed cosmic evolution to show the dates of the major steps in cosmic evolution spread throughout one year, with seemingly significant steps in human history only appearing in the final seconds. Many people have creatively applied media and visualization technology to help us achieve a visceral sense of the spatial and temporal scales of the universe.

A classic short film about the scales of everything, which still stands up after more than 30 years, is "Powers of 10" by the husband and wife team of Ray and Charles Eames (1977). The film borrowed the concept from the 1957 book Cosmic View by Kees Boeke, and the narration is by the late great Philip Morrison (a physicist who was a huge influence on me when I was young and whom I was privileged to meet on several occasions). It starts with a couple enjoying a picnic by the lakeside in Chicago and zooms out to the edge of the universe, highlighting every power of ten change in scale. Then it reverses, zooming back to the Earth and continuing deep inside the cells of the mans hand. The film was made in 1977 and, among many achievements, won first prize at a psychedelic film festival. The science stands up very well over the intervening decades. Some of the details of how we model and understand the structures inside of atoms of the mans hand and the very large scale distribution of galaxy clusters is slightly different in the way we would tell the story now. But what strikes me is that most of the content seems current and the perspective still jars and inspires.

One of the best Simpsons intros I've ever seen is also a riff on Powers of Ten.

A more recent effort comes in the form of a really cool flash animation called "The Scale of the Universe" made by Cary and Michael Huang. This takes advantage of the interactive nature of new web tools and lets you scroll between scales, showing representative structures and seamlessly zooming in and out, spanning the range of physical scales to the limits of what even makes sense to our science.

Here is yet another scale-visualizing interactive, this one focusing on the sizes of biological objects, from a coffee bean on down to a carbon atom.

And here is another cool interactive tool, based on the original Powers of 10 film.

On a cosmic time scale, humans have been here for just a moment. Now science and technology are rapidly changing the ways we interact with the world and conceive of ourselves within it.

In some ways we must be better at conceiving of large distances than our ancestors. Now we see the world from the sky, travel thousands of miles in a day, zoom around "in" Google Earth, and see pictures of our planet from space. On the other hand, riding horseback across a continent might have given you more of a visceral feel for the actual distances covered. Plausiblly we've become somewhat more adept at conceiving of global scales, even while city lights and indoor comforts have distanced us from the depths of the night sky.