Representing Scale: Powers of Ten
My recent post on representing large numbers in a speech coincided with preparing to publish the second part of Denna Jones’ guest posting on why she’s switching from PowerPoint to Prezi. Denna, an architect and speaker, references the 1977 film, Powers of Ten, by Charles and Ray Eames. The film
… has the capacity to expand the way we think and view our world. Over ten million people have seen the film, and it continues to be shown in classrooms, business meetings, festivals and retreats around the world. Starting with a sleeping man at a picnic, the film takes the viewer on a journey out to the edge of space and then back into a carbon atom in the hand of the man at the picnic, all in a single shot. It is an unforgettable experience.
This illustrates how, at the scale of the very large and the scale of the very small, all is light. As Adi Da Samraj has said:
All manifest things and beings appear within a universal cosmic theater of the physics of light.
Today’s newspapers carried the most recent image of the Planck telescope’s image of the ‘known universe’:
Better than any words or abstract mathematical formula, these pictures and the 9-minute Eames film brings home to viewers the scale of the universe we inhabit; consider how images such as this could be used in your next talk.
3 Comments so far
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Ian:
Back in January I blogged about explaining small thickness and also mentioned being inspired by the Powers of Ten film.
Richard
By Richard I. Garber on 07.07.10 6:19 am
Richard:
A great explanation of smallness. I can imagine that many presenters in the computer chip industry would benefit from clearly explaining the scale of a 28 nanometer silicon chip in ways a layperson could understand.
By Ian on 07.07.10 8:38 am
Here’s a new homage to Powers of Ten by IBM
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xyvmA4mI8zU
By Steve Hamm on 10.11.10 9:10 am
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