Tuesday, February 21, 2012

Getting a Sense of Scale

One of the hardest things in studying either the cosmos or the fundamental structure of matter is wrapping your head around the sizes of things. Atoms and particles are so unfathomably small, and galaxies and galaxy clusters are just so unfathomably large.

Of course, the classic video "Powers of Ten" still does a great job of conveying these vastly different scales. I still love this - it is elegant and thought-provoking:

Also, it's worth checking out the interactive web version, based on the film.

An updated take on a similar story is this video from the American Museum of Natural History, which incorporates modern astronomical data into the illustration of the cosmos so that they more accurately represent what we know about what's out there.


Finally, a couple of students have sent me links to versions of this cool interactive graphic that shows the size scales of a whole bunch of things with a slider bar to move around. It's not made by scientists and has a couple of not-100%-accurate bits, but it more than makes up for that by having random weird and cool facts throughout. Definitely worth your time to play with for a while:
The Scale of the Universe version 2 by HTwins

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