documentary · general · evergreen
Powers of Ten™ (1977)
Eames Office · Aug 27, 2010 · 9m 1s
What this video covers
The Eames Office's 1977 film Powers of Ten starts at a picnic in Chicago and zooms out by a factor of ten every ten seconds to the edge of the universe. It then zooms inward to a proton in a carbon atom.
Why it surfaced in Hacker News
HN commenters recommend it as the classic visualization for building intuition about scale, and it comes up whenever a thread concerns scale or size comparisons.
- 9
- distinct recommenders
- 8
- recommendation months
- 2
- strong recommendations
Recommendation context
Short excerpts from positive mentions. Open the source to read the full Hacker News discussion.
“is an excellent resource that is still shown in introductory university physics lectures”
“a classic video that demonstrates the scale of the Universe from the micro to the macro perspectives”
“Is a nice recap of just how vast the universe really is”