The Scale of Things

Ignore the wanky music (there's an option to turn volume off) on Nikon's Universcale flash site and it's pretty damn cool. Seriously. It spans  femtometres (10⁻¹⁵ meters) all the way through meters and kilometers all the way up to light years (10¹⁵ meters) while giving you examples of things that size. Left to its own devices the display will shrink down to the examples of size. From mountains to skyscrapers to the London eye down to people, and microbes. Again, like the large blue whale captured in WDCS's website, there's something completely hypnotic about it. Meditative even.  Go ahead. Get yourself a sense of scale. It ought to do you good.

Comments

[Jason]

Thanks for the link. It's a little malformed though. Think you have a "mailto:" in there.

[ssp]

You may want to remove the minus in the light years number.

To me it looked a bit like a cheap rip-off of IBM's Powers of Ten (http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=6945724039283018435) film from the '70s, though.

[anon]

minor typo: 1 light year ~ 10^16 m (not 10^-26), 10 billion light years (order of magnitude of the observable universe) ~ 10^26 m

[Katie]

Have changed that link so it's now correct, and have also changed the light years bit. Anon thinks it's 10^16, but I think it's 10^15. Wikipedia says a light year is 9,460,730,472,580.8km, which is 9,460,730,472,580,800m http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Light_year . My primary school way of working out what ten is to the power of, is to imagine the decimal point hopping until you have a number between 1 and 10, and then the power-of is the number of hops. That's 15 hops so 10^15. Wikipedia agrees with me that it's 10^15. Is that right?

[anon]

Hi Katie,

Small Fix: The Wikipedia link in your comment is broken because it contains a spurious ")" at the end.

As you correctly point out, 1 ly ~ 9.46 x 10^15 m.

Now, 9.46 is pretty darn close to 10, so 1 ly ~ 1 x 10^16 m.

Cheers ;)

[Katie]

Gotcha. Link changed. My brain goes bendy when I think about all those zeroes so I'm never sure I've got it just right. I quite like the symmetry of 10^-15 and 10^15 so I might leave it as it is in the post. If that's wrong I'm sure someone will tell me...