Monday, June 12, 2006

Powers of 10

When I was a young warthog, I would lay in a field and stare into the night sky; I could usually shield myself from enough light to make it iteresting. It caused me to ponder the vastness of the universe, and I wondered about my place in it. Mentally, I would "zoom out" to the limits of my imagination and knowledge. It is an interesting experiment.
In 1977, Charles and Ray Eames made a nine-minute film called Powers of Ten that still has the capacity today to expand the way we think and view our world. Over ten million people have since seen the film and it continues to be shown in classrooms, business meetings, festivals and retreats everywhere. Starting with a sleeping man at a picnic, the film takes the viewer on a journey out to the edge of space and then back into a carbon atom in the hand of the man picnic, all in a single shot. It is an unforgettable experience. . . Powers of Ten illustrates the universe as an arena of both continuity and change, of everyday picnics and cosmic mystery.
Then, one day I came across a video entitled "Powers of 10". I found this video very fascinating and tried later on to reproduce similar effects on Google Earth, but nothing really does justice to the movie. If you have not seen "Powers of 10" you can watch it on YouTube (also embedded below).

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