As Douglas Adams said, ‘The Universe is big. Very big.’

In the second of my series of three posts about the Universe, here’s a film called ‘Powers of Ten’.

I think it was made by IBM at some point in the early 70s. Like ‘Cosmic Zoom’, the film in the 60s which I referenced in a previous post, this tries to show the scale of things, starting from a one square metre on the earth’s surface, and then shows how things get bigger and bigger by simply adding a nought at the end. It’s the power of ten.

Once we’ve reached the limit of the known universe, we go backwards to the orginal square metre, and start taking away a zero, so that we go into the micro-universe inside us all. This will make more sense when you watch the film:

~ by Paul Badger on 22 April, 2008.