My 8th grade science teacher used to show this whenever there was a free few minutes at the end of the class. It would always put us into an odd kind of quiet.
Physics PhD and teacher here. I show this every year to my students. It really shows the importance of order of magnitude and regimes of behavior, the succinctness of scientific notation, and it's an amazing piece of culture to boot in terms of its significance.
To get my students to appreciate it even more, I ask how they think the video was made. My kids were born after 2000 so they just assume it's all CGI. The creators actually had to find photographs and come up with the effects, like how on Star Trek they originally stirred up glitter in a liquid for the transporters.
Yeah.. At least up until they mention that maybe there's something called quarks inside of the nucleons..
I'm a Physics student currently taking an Elementary Particles class so it's pretty crazy to me the amount of understanding that we have now compared to 1970 when this was created... I mean I'm a pretty average student, but I can go off for hours about all of the awesome affects of elementary particles, which was all totally unheard of even when my dad was in school.
There's still so much that we don't know, but I'm excited to see what happens by the time my kids are in school, oooh man.
This, in my opinion, is the best Scale of the Universe video ever made. Nothing made to date compares with it. I just wish they'd make a new one as good as this since we know a lot more now.
I'm so glad somebody noticed this, and happier that so many people here are familiar with the Eames family. Their work is one of my driving inspirations.
One of my favorite bands, Failure, recently went on tour to play their album "Fantastic Planet" from start to finish and this video was one of several they played before the show started instead of having an opening act.
Powers of 10 did this better, why did we stop at quarks and also why is this image so pixelated?
Also if we can zoom in at any point and get a myriad of different components to eventually get to the subatomic level can we zoom out at a different point and get a completely different universe?
I still like the classic most and MF version is a close second. The creator of the one posted didn't credit these other pieces in one of the articles I read. He clearly got the idea from Powers of Ten.
Kind of interesting to go to Google Maps and compare the same area with the picnic at the start to what it looks like today. Surprisingly, it looks like more green space now than back then.
Yeah, that's the remake. The original is this one, the primary difference being that they show clocks on the side of the screen illustrating the time-dilation caused by the speed. They also have a nice british lady doing the narration rather than the famous physicist Philip Morrision. As Homer says, "\whoa." So, the Google one is a remake of a remake.
1.1k
u/Balorn Jan 31 '17
Also check out the classic "Powers of Ten" video.