The Powers of Ten are two short American documentary films written and directed by Charles and Ray Eames. Both works depict the relative scale of the universe according to an order of magnitude (or logarithmic scale) based on a factor of ten, first expanding out from the Earth until the entire universe is surveyed, then reducing inward until a single atom and its quarks are observed.

History and background

The first film, A Rough Sketch for a Proposed Film Dealing with the Powers of Ten and the Relative Size of Things in the Universe, was a prototype and was completed in 1968; the second film, Powers of Ten: A Film Dealing with the Relative Size of Things in the Universe and the Effect of Adding Another Zero, was completed in 1977.

The Powers of Ten films were adaptations of the book Cosmic View (1957) by Dutch educator Kees Boeke. Both films, and a book based on the second film, follow the form of the Boeke original, adding color and photography to the black and white drawings employed by Boeke in his seminal work.

The 1977 film has a number of changes from the prototype, including being entirely in color, moving the starting location from Miami to Chicago, removing the relativistic (time) dimension, introducing an additional two powers of ten at each extreme, a change in narrator from Judith Bronowski to Philip Morrison, and much-improved graphics. near Soldier Field, then <!--10^3--> (where we see the entirety of Chicago), and so on, increasing the perspective and continuing to zoom out to a field of view of , or a field of view 100 million light years across. 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 into the man's hand, to views of negative powers of ten: 10 centimeters (), and so forth, revealing a white blood cell and zooming in on it—until the camera comes to quarks in a proton of a carbon atom at .

In 1998, Powers of Ten, the 1977 version, was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant".

  • Cosmic Zoom (1968), the aforementioned eight-minute short from Canada.
  • Cosmic Voyage (1996), the Oscar-nominated loose remake of Powers of Ten in IMAX format for the National Air and Space Museum.
  • Our Universe is SO big, it's mindblowing! (2021)

See also

  • Cosmic Eye (2012), remake of Powers of Ten
  • Orders of magnitude
  • Earth's location in the universe

References