Jun 2, 2024
There’s a famous short, nine minute, movie, I’m sure you’ve seen it, Powers of Ten made by the married couple of industrial designers Charles and Ray Eames, prototyped in 1968 and re-released, in color, on my 30th birthday in 1977. The film is narrated by MIT physicist Philip Morrison, with music by Elmer Bernstein and was released by IBM.
“Powers of Ten” begins with a scene of a picnic on the Lake Michigan shore, the camera moves ten times further away every ten seconds until it reaches the edge of the known universe, and then the journey reverses, moving in to an atomic nucleus, the smallest unit of matter known to scientists at the time.
The UK Open University comissioned the BBC and Brian Cox (the astronomer, not the actor) to take another look at the astronomical part (not the microscopic to quantum realm) of the story over four decades later.
For reasons I don’t remember, I was reminiscing about powers of ten last week (and pulling inaccurate numbers from my memory), comparing the earth’s magnetic field to that of an MRI. I also mentioned my being a research astronomer for a few years, learning about stars, galaxies and, then hypothesized, exotic objects like black holes, trying to wrap my head around how much energy they emitted. Powers of ten, indeed.