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Machten van 10
2022-07-25

Powers of 10

This book is based on a movie made by Charles and Ray Eames called 'Powers of Ten: A Film Dealing with the Relative Size of Things in the Universe and the Effect of Adding Another Zero'. In the film, you see a scene of two people picnicking in a Chicago park, seen from above, framed in a square. Then the dimensions increase tenfold and you go on a journey that takes you beyond the planet Earth, the Solar System, the Milky Way into intergalactic space. Then the journey is reversed and the dimensions become ten times smaller each time and you go via the scene of the picnic to the hand of one of the picnickers and then, ever smaller, to a cell, a molecule, an atom, to finally arrive at the building blocks of the atomic nucleus.

I did not see the real movie myself, as it was too expensive to buy. Now that there are YouTube versions, it's a breeze and the film is easy to find (see below). Still, the book made a big impression on me. Besides pictures of the movie, the book also explains what you see in the pictures.

In the meantime, updates have been made for this trip ... And maybe there will be more updates in the future, as soon as there is evidence for the existence of a cosmos consisting of multiple universes, a 'multiverse' and/or as soon as there is evidence for the existence of even smaller building blocks than quarks and leptons, like 'strings' ...

A similar book has also been written about time: 'Time In Powers Of Ten: Natural Phenomena And Their Timescales', by Dutch physicists Gerard 't Hooft and Stefan Vandoren (2014).

Powers of Ten, 1977, original film

Cosmic Eye, 2018