Powers of Ten is a 1977 short documentary film written and directed by Ray Eames and her husband, Charles Eames. 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.)

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."

Summary

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 10¹ m in standard form), revealing that the man is picnicking in a park with a female companion. The zoom-out continues (at a rate of one power of ten per 10 seconds), 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 10²⁴ meters, or the size of the observable universe. The camera then zooms back in at a rate of a power of ten per 2 seconds to the picnic, and then slows back down to its original rate to views of negative powers of ten—10^-1 m (10 centimeters), and so forth, until carbon nucleus is visible inside the man's hand at a range of 10^-16 meter.

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 10⁷ m rectangle fits snugly around the Earth, but the Earth should really be somewhat bigger (when zooming back in, it is 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

• Cosmic Zoom (1968) which was based on an essay called Cosmic View, by the National Film Board of Canada.
• Simply Atomic (1972) based upon an outre comic fanzine.
• Cosmic Voyage (1996) http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0115952/ an IMAX film.

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 10²⁶ 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 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"

See also

• Orders of magnitude (length)

External links

• Official website
• Exhibit at the California Academy of Sciences
• A website with a tutorial very similar to ''The Powers of Ten'' Note: Requires Java
• xkcd spoof version, "Powers of One"
• A Photograph version online Similar Photographs 1
• ''Powers of Ten'' at the Internet Movie Database
• ''Powers of 10'' at The Universe-Solved! website
• A similar Flash, also using the title "Cosmic Zoom"

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