Slide the scale from the immensity of the universe as a whole, down to the planck scale.
Always awe-inspiring to see demonstrations like this. Reminds me of the first time I watched Powers of Ten in an Astronomy 101 course.
That’s beyond amazing. The smallest and largest scales boggle my mind.
I saw this some days ago, and it’s indeed well-done and amazing – which makes it a bit more grating that it contains the old ‘the universe is 14 billion years old, so its observable size is 14 billion light years’-error: thanks to expansion, the edge of the observable universe is in fact about 46.5 billion light years out, giving it a diameter of 93 Gly; that figure is given as an estimated size of the ‘whole’ universe, about which nothing certain is known – that might range anywhere from 78 Gly (yes, the universe might be smaller than the observable universe – in that case, light has had time to circumnavigate the universe since the big bang, and some pictures of far away galaxies are actually nearby ones whose light has travelled around once) to infinity.
Also, it seems they’ve taken some particular neutrino cross section to be its ‘size’, which is somewhat ill-defined, and nobody knows whether there’s any preons, or quantum foam, or of what if any significance the planck length actually is – nevertheless, the demonstration is certainly awe-inspiring, and it’s only my tendency to show my appreciation – for both the presentation and the concepts it embodies – via attention to the details that makes me pick these nits.
I was particularly struck by the range of sizes stars come in – the sun seems pretty far away and rather big, but with some of those giants, you could fit half the solar system into them…
I hope they come out with a sequel. I want some added features:
- The ability to scroll around, not just zoom.
- The ability to move objects, so you can compare sizes directly.
- More objects in the human scale range, such as a football field.
Still, a very good modern version of Powers of Ten.
Ten shades of awesome!
And now…Universcale!
What’s really amazing is that this is in the realm of human knowledge.
And yet, we still can’t invent a refrigerator ice dispenser which doesn’t drop an ice cube five seconds after you turn it off.
That is great. I have a link that shows the scale of small things down to atom size. But this new link is awesome. Where is my house? With Google Earth I can find my house.