Powers+Of+Ten+museum+exhibit+by+Demetrios

=Powers Of Ten museum exhibit by Demetrios=

toc Read here about an exhibit staged in the Eames Office in honor to the Powers of Ten film by Eames.

=Overview= The Eames Office created dozens of exhibitions between 1943 and 1988. Powers of Ten—A Traveling Exhibition uses the journey in scale to provide a rich intellectual and visual experience for visitors to the gallery. Each of the powers of ten appears on 27" by 27" photographic panels. Brief captions identify each power of ten. Longer text panels integrate these images into other views of the universe and tell the story of how humanity has come to know what it knows. Large objects in the center of the space taken from the community where the exhibition is on view provides a sense of scale. In the foyer, local students have shared drawings of the something very large and something very small. We have sorted these by scale. The film Powers of Ten plays on continuous loop. A Production of the Eames Office, Designed by Eames Demetrios.

From the website @http://www.eamesoffice.com/exhibitions, accessed 10 June 2011 1600 GMT.

=Table Of Displayed Scenes Of Scale=

Table of scales in the exhibit (this list is the same in the Eames's film, book and exhibit).
 * Power of Ten || Title ||
 * 25 || Far extreme of time and space in Cosmology ||
 * 24 || Empty space, distant galaxies like clotted dust ||
 * 23 || Virgo Cluster of galaxies ||
 * 22 || Galactic companionship: Local Group of galaxies with Andromeda and 30 others ||
 * 21 || Milky Way with the Clouds of Magellan and 14 dwarf galaxies ||
 * 20 || Milky Way galaxy spiral ||
 * 19 || Milky Way galaxy structure and its rich broth of stars. ||
 * 18 || Within the disk of the Galaxy. ||
 * 17 || Stars. Interstellar space. ||
 * 16 || Distance to our nearest stellar neighbor, Alpha Centauri. ||
 * 15 || A light year. One central star, the sun. ||
 * 14 || Great cloud of icy comets, the Oort Cloud ||
 * 13 || Celestial neighborhood of the Solar System ||
 * 12 || Outer planets (Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune) ||
 * 11 || Inner planets with portions of Jupiter’s orbit ||
 * 10 || Inner planets (Mercury, Venus, Earth, and Mars), path Earth travels in six weeks ||
 * 9 || Pth Earth and Moon travel in four days ||
 * 8 || The Earth and Moon ||
 * 7 || Path Earth travels in one hour ||
 * 6 || The Earth. ||
 * 5 || A region, state, province, or small country: Lake Michigan ||
 * 4 || A city: Metropolitan area of Chicago. ||
 * 3 || A town or village ||
 * 2 || Largest living organisms, buildings, ships ||
 * 1 || Community, the built environment, a field ||
 * 0 || People, human companionship ||
 * -1 || A hand ||
 * -2 || Skin, delicate flowers, small creatures, width of an adult fingernail ||
 * -3 || Creases of the skin ||
 * -4 || Precision surgery and fine blood vessels ||
 * -5 || White blood cell, a lymphocyte ||
 * -6 || Membrane of a lymphocyte cell nucleus ||
 * -7 || Portion of a chromosome ||
 * -8 || DNA double helix, an individual gene or simple virus ||
 * -9 || Base pairs of DNA ||
 * -10 || Outer electron shell of a carbon atom. ||
 * -11 || Innermost electron shell of a carbon atom. ||
 * -12 || Gamma ray wavelength ||
 * -13 || Carbon atom nucleus ||
 * -14 ||
 * -15 || Inner structure of the proton ||
 * -16 || Domain within which quarks operate ||
 * -17 ||
 * -18 || A quark, electron or positron ||

=Excerpts from the exhibit= Below are texts from the exhibit.

10^-18
Throughout this exhibition, we will look at these powers of ten in a variety of ways: spatially, temporally, literally, numerically, metaphorically and so on. Each of these images and ideas is intended to give us another way to think about these orders of magnitude. Our journey begins here, at the scale of the quark, a fundamental component of the atom which is, in turn, the basic building block of the world we see around us.

10^-17
When we look at the image above from the Eames film Powers of Ten, we might well ask: how do we know that? How do we know that that representation has validity? In the end, especially at the extreme scales of our knowledge, we come back to Mathematics as a key tool for understanding. Mathematics is the essential tool that we use to extend the reach of our curiosity - perhaps because it is almost alone at the extreme limits of our ken, people have argued throughout history about whether Mathematics is a science or a philosophy. Since a quote that the Eameses liked was “A mathematician who is not also a poet will never be a complete mathematician” by Karl Weierstrass, it may be fitting that the two threads came together when Charles was named the Charles Eliot Norton professor of Poetry at Harvard - a post traditionally held for a year that celebrated poetry in the broadest sense. In the Norton Lectures, Charles touched on Mathematics as well as asked for a deeper definition of creativity.

10^-16
As with all the Powers of Ten, there are many ways to look at this scale which is 1/10th the size of a proton - the tiny building block of matter present in every atom in the universe. But we offer 3 perspectives here. At the time the film "Powers of Ten" was made 10^-16 meters was the scale at which the journey faded to black, still pushing forward into the mystery. At that time the quark theory seemed promising, but still fairly speculative. Today, all 6 hypothesized quarks have been found.

10^-15
Indeed, as we contemplate the scale of the proton, it is a good place to acknowledge the hands-on dimension of learning in the scientific process. It is not simply a matter of creating a theory; it is about creating the experiments that test that theory.

10^-14
This is the scale of the nucleus of the atom. The number of protons in the nucleus determines what element a given atom is. For example, the carbon atom in the hand of the sleeping man at the picnic has 6 protons - and 6 neutrons (the number of neutrons in an atoms nucleus can vary, but change the number of protons and you change what element it is). The image above shows a representation of the nucleus of a carbon atom. One way to think about this scale is to think of the amazing Marie Curie who embodied the transition between human-scale science and science at scales just out of reach. She manually distilled tons of radioactive ore to a single gram of the element radium (at considerable cost to her health). This hands-on exploration was in turn a key contributor to the understanding of the numbering of the elements which culminated in the modern periodic table.

10^-13
As the vast emptiness of the interior of the atom dominates this power of ten in Space, this makes it an appropriate order of magnitude to consider this scale in Time. To get a feeling for how short this is, if you were racing to the Sun and were fast enough to get there in one second, after 10^-13 seconds you would have traveled only half an inch. But although 10^-13 seconds may seem impossibly small, as we have already seen, atomic clocks are more precise than this. This is the scale of certain lasers, used in surgery and used to manipulate time itself. A femtosecond laser (10^-13 seconds is 100 femtoseconds) refers to how often a pulse of light is emitted in the laser. And many meaningful aspects of this scale in time are best manifested at this scale in space as well.

10^-12
When most of us think of models in daily life, we think of things like this model of one of the habitats for the National Aquarium designed by the Eames Office (in collaboration with Dinkeloo and Roche, the successor firm to Eero Saarinen’s office). But models come in many forms and help us understand different scales. For the Eameses, a model was also a way to try out an idea or to present information in a way that made it more meaningful. This entire exhibition is a model of the idea of scale. Modeling in this sense is an important part of the history of science - particularly the history of understanding this power of ten. Beginning more than 100 years ago, towards the end of the 19th century, the question of what was the right model through which to understand the atomic scale was a central intellectual battlefield of physics.

10^-11
We are at the scale of the inner electron shell. This shell is not an actual shell or even an actual orbit of a planet, it is a kind of zone of the probability of finding these electrons of the inner shell. The journey of understanding electricity, grasping the unity of magnetism and electricity and the discovery of the electron, were key stepping stones in understanding this scale. Each discovery built on the last. A final reminder, all the images of the atom and smaller are different than the images of larger scales, such as the chair seen to our right. While the chair looks pretty much like that picture, this Powers of Ten image is, in a sense, a model of what things are like at this scale. We can not see anything at this scale, in the sense we usually mean it. This is because when we see, we see light reflecting off an object. Well, this electron shell is far tinier than the wavelengths of visible light, so there is no information to be reflected and taken in by our retinas. So we must model it instead. It is why there are no photographs of atoms in the way we would think of a typical photo.

10^-10
This is the scale of the atom. As with all the powers of ten, one can consider it in many ways: spatially, numerically, temporally, philosophically, fantastically, and even as a kind of habitat, but also one can consider it metaphorically. Thought of in this way, the atomic scale, while filled with all sorts of literal meanings seen in the images to the right, also offers a potent metaphor. After all, though we have seen smaller building blocks - like quarks, protons, neutrons, electrons and the sub-nuclear menagerie, the atom is the scale where something from the world of things cannot be smaller and still keep its elemental essence. Thinking of it that way invites the question: what is the atomic unit of any enterprise. For the Eames Office, in many ways that essential unit was 901 Washington Boulevard, where Charles and Ray worked from 1943 until their deaths. As former Eames staff member said, it “was Charles’ instrument and he knew exactly how to play it.” On the monitor is 901: after 45 years of working by filmmaker Eames Demetrios; the film documents the original studio and records its closing. The images to the right also give a sense of the Atomic scale in its more literal sense.

10^-9
This is the scale of simple molecules and the building blocks of DNA. We are now moving from the realms of pure physics and chemistry into the simplest structures of biology. It is no longer enough to know which atom is which, it is how and with which other ones they connect that becomes important at this scale. Part of the magic though, is that all the forces, subatomic and atomic that were in play before are included in the connections that make up life. Chemistry doesn’t stop being chemistry just because it is biochemistry, it just has a different kind of richness. As the Charles Eames quote on the ceiling beams of this room says: “Eventually Everything Connects.”

10^-8
This is the scale of strands of DNA, of viruses and prions (the almost fragmentary life-forms behind Mad Cow Disease and others). It is also the scale of the most fundamental spiral in our lives - the spiral of DNA. When Watson and Crick figured out the secret of the genetic code, they used a simple cardboard model and they used pi, the essential number from geometry, to determine the radius of the molecule - more connections between scale and more resonances from basic understandings. Though we have a more or less clear view and understanding of the genome today, basic mysteries abound. We are still trying to understand exactly how a given gene actually makes a certain trait, if a prion is alive, and how exactly a tiny virus incapacitates and evens kills a much larger organism. There are other powers of ten at this scale. The human genome has between 50 and 250 million base pairs. An HIV virus mutates faster than its host can create antibodies – meaning that battle for the life of the person ranges across time as well as space.

10^-7
All the powers of ten are interlinked and give us a new ways to consider our world. Although water as a molecule is somewhere between 10^-10 and 10^-09 in scale, and its chemical formula is the world-famous molecule-H2O many aspects of its behavior are still being understood. In fact, some of its qualities are best examined at this scale. Indeed, in the end, all of its remarkable qualities spring from its molecular nature which is now only starting to be understood. There is reason to think that such research may explain a simple thing we all take for granted: why is water necessary for life?

10^-6
As a power of ten in time: a millionth of a second. This is the speed of the superfast stroboscopic cameras that pioneers like Harold Edgerton, working on the leading edge of technology, used to explore microtime. Edgerton, while experimenting at MIT in his incredible workshop, used a stroboscopic flash to work his magic; today even faster speeds are possible - 440 trillionths of a second (4.4 x 10^-13) - through the use of a laser. Edgerton had a voracious curiosity and a let’s-see-what-will-happen-if-we-do-that attitude: what happens when an apple is shot by a bullet? Can a perfect crown be made from a milkdrop? Let’s get a picture!... As a Powers of Ten in space: a micron, a millionth of a meter. This is the scale at which optical microscopes share their treasures. A power or so further in and we are at the limit of an optical microscope. That journey was started by Leeuwenhoek and Hooke around the same time as the discovery of the telescope - but it took a while to catch on. The telescope fed into an ancient obsession with the stars, but it took a while to imagine the richness of the microworld. One of the mysteries to contemplate is the reason why we can’t see all these little things all the time? After all they are there all the time. The reason is due to the resolution of our retinas themselves: that is our limit. So once again, we use tools to make a remote scale accessible. In fact, the whole history of human curiosity can be seen as man bringing remote powers of ten into the human scale so that they can be appreciated, understood, teased, and engaged.

10^-5
One can consider this the scale of sound - at least for humans. Humans can hear frequencies between 20 and 25,000 cycles per second that extreme works out to 4 x 10^-05 (4/100,000) of a second. Everything from a siren to a whisper, from a leaf blower to chamber music, happens within that range. But there is another way to connect sound and scale - what are the sounds from the different powers of ten? We’ve given you a chance to listen to sounds of scales ranging from the nucleus of the atom to the early universe at the station to your right. 10^-05 (100 microns) is also the scale of the jewel-like organisms called diatoms, once avidly collected during Victorian England’s microscope craze. These improbable organisms have a body of glass and, although related to algae, many have the capability of self-locomotion. And, of course, a beam of light of this wavelength would be considered infrared or ultraviolet.

10^-4
We are at the scale of biomechanics - the scale at which fine surgeons operate. The scale where cells communicate with each other, where the brain’s neurons begin to conglomerate into regions, where cells become vessels. One way to understand this scale is to talk to a neurosurgeon - someone who operates on the brain: Frances Conley. Since there is no such thing as exploratory neurosurgery, how does one get the experience one needs? Conley points out that lay people often imagine that it is a world of exclusively high-tech, tiny scale operations. However, there are many surgeries where the surgery involved takes place at a larger scale. No matter the scale, the need for care. Conley compares it to a guild, to a craft. When a doctor that she is teaching finally performs surgery, it is only possible at the point when she, Conley, can be sure that the new surgeon’s hands will be performing exactly as if they are her own. One fascinating thing about neurosurgery is that it is about the brain - cutting or suturing or manipulating the tissues within it - as opposed to the mind and yet everything you do in the brain case can affect, hopefully improve, the quality of the mind’s experience. We are reminded over and over again of the intangible nature of consciousness. To put it another way, when Frances Conley operates she is able to mentally block out awareness of the individuality of the patient. There is simply a pathology in the patient’s brain that must be addressed. From the moment the patient goes under, her task is to perform the procedure in the most aware way possible, prepared for new information at all times, but, equally, intent on completing the task as originally envisioned - quick, but unhurried. She brings extraordinary discipline to her practice - she must in order to do her job effectively. If she were to become obsessed during an operation with doubt or worry, this so-called concern would do the patient more harm rather than less. But this concentration, this temporary mental block, is as effective on a temporary, self-willed basis as any anesthetic or brain injury. Our everyday use of the mind has nuance and detail that our understanding of the flesh of the brain does not yet. Outside the operating room, the patient becomes an individual again; as Conley says, “that person’s a person, and you know that he wants to pet his cat tomorrow.”

10^-3
In 1929, Danish zoophysiologist August Krogh, A Nobel Prize winner, enunciated what is known as Krogh’s Principle. Essentially it suggested that for every biological problem (or, in this sense, mystery), there is somewhere an organism perfectly suited to study it. That same year, across the Atlantic and more, was born a boy who would grow up to be a legendary biologist and Pulitzer Prize winning author: E.O. Wilson. As a youth, Wilson loved traipsing through the woods of his native Alabama looking for and studying ants; as an adult, he became one of the leading myrmecologists (that’s a studier of ants) of all time. Wilson took Krogh’s Principle and stood it on its head. Since he loved ants, he decided that, for every organism, there is a biological problem for which it is perfectly suited to study. And then he took it further: he consciously considered ants at many different scales. As he says in the video, People Who Think About Small Powers of Ten, “The ant lives in a millimeter world.” In exploring that world, Wilson found that ants can detect chemicals at practically the quantum level (around 10^-10 or 10^-09). He discovered the odor trails they follow, the nuanced chemical communication at the scale of the nest, the operations of the queen… At larger scales, Wilson was the first to make breakthroughs in the mysteries of the super-organism (an ant colony of a million ants is more than a tiny insect but not quite a large single organism of comparable body mass). Today, he continues to write; his latest is an amazing novel about ants and the environment, written not in an anthropomorphic vein but in a moving, yet rigorous, way. He is also a passionate advocate for the preservation of biodiversity. His latest project is the Encyclopedia of Life (www.eol.org) - an online resource with a page for each species. Just as Powers of Ten, while centering on a tiny carbon atom, reveals the universe, a lifetime spent studying the tiny ant ends up revealing the universe of life.

10^-2
In spatial scales: a centimeter. This is a spatial scale that seems quite small, but a centimeter can be quite noticeable in our everyday activities. We have all encountered the annoyance that occurs when something just won’t physically fit at this scale: whether packing something for shipping, doing work around our home, or buckling our belt! In time: a 100th of a second, the scale at which some sports especially races - are won or lost. This is more or less the speed of a typical snapshot. This timescale is too fast for us to “see” (although baseball great Ted Williams could see the seams on a fastball racing towards him at 100 miles an hour), but it is one that we can definitely intuit or sense. This is not simply an arbitrary artifact of technology. The reason why movies work in the theater is a phenomenon known as “persistence of vision,” where 24 frames per second (each exposure being about 1/50th of a second - which is closer to 10^-02 than it is to 10^-01 and thus at this timescale) is the biological minimum to achieve that illusion. In quantification: a percent (which comes from the Latin word meaning “by the hundred”). Again, within this scale, percentage increments begin to be perceptible. 1 percent of the population of a big city is a significant group of people. That amount out of your paycheck is noticeable. 1 percent for public art (1 percent of building costs) visibly changes the built environment. Government fuel efficiency standards that change by 1% actually save millions of gallons of fuel. In a public opinion poll, 1% is not decisive perhaps within the margin of error, but still indicates a possible trend.

10^-1
This is the scale of the hand. For human beings, there has always been a special connection between the hand and the mind. Our brain is specially wired to learn using this connection. Perhaps this accounts for the primal fascination of the well-crafted object. This is a scale that we understand. We manipulate things at this scale, interrogate them with our touch, and then, from this touchstone of scale, we often try to apply our learning and metaphors to other scales. Most of our sense organs operate around this power of ten - a sensory scale in general. When we close our eyes and listen or smell or taste, it is a much more intimate experience than the scale of the picnic, one power of ten higher, but not quite as abstract as the realm found at the scale of the centimeter, one power lower. This is the scale at which we gather the puzzle pieces of our world to put together at the human scale.

10^0
This is the human scale - roughly the size of a human being. This is the scale of our daily lives. At every scale in the journey of this exhibition, one can imagine (with more or less difficulty!) putting blinders on and experiencing that scale. For example, when the nucleus of the atom fills the frame - that is all we see and engage with. And if we were a proton, that would be our whole world. When the Milky Way fills the frame, as it will, that single, vast object is what we consider. And, if we were a sister galaxy, that would be everything. But here at the human scale, as people - for us - something else occurs. This is our scale, so here we can be anthropocentric imagining ourselves at the center of the universe. Everything in our purview, including this exhibition, we pull into ourselves and construct our experience from. This history of science and human curiosity is, as we said before, the history of bringing other orders of magnitude into our own. Now, that sounds a bit self-centered, but there is another way to approach it. Charles Eames once said that “the role of the designer is essentially that of a good host, anticipating the needs of the guest.” This guest/host relationship is the key to the Eames design process and is present in all of their work, from the chairs to the films to the exhibitions. This idea is design at its most universal, not simply involved in the making of things. As Charles asked, “In the modern city, who is the guest and who is the host?” So it invites us to consider a new kind of self-centeredness, because while this Powers of Ten journey pivots on the human scale, it is not your self, but instead a more universal self.

10^1
If the human scale was, in a sense, about the individual, then at this scale we begin to reach out to our most intimate community - our family. This is the scale of the home, of langauge, of conversation. Locked in oneself, whether one speaks or not is a choice. With others around, it is close to a necessity. While other animals besides humans do use langauge to communicate amongst themselves, it is fair to say that no other species is remotely close to being as sophisticated or as dependent on langauge. No human culture exists without langauge - no matter how remote, which suggests a development of langauge before humans really began to spread out. In any event, about 50,000 years, most linguists believe, humans began to develop langauge. Today there are almost 7000 living langauges - tragically most are under assault as globalization makes English, Chinese and Spanish the first choice for many. Words bridge many scales, but the first one is the one of home. This scale (10^01) is also the scale of boulders, of giant gears, of trucks, of the iconic shipping containers on them, and of elephants. Not only elephants, but most of the big animals one can think of are around this scale. Consider the blue whale: the largest mammal at 30 or so meterswell, that is closer to 10^01 meters (10) than to 10^02 meters (100). This is an important point: as we speak of things being “at a scale,” we are often talking of a range - not a single magic number. Incidentally, there are bigger organisms than a whale. There is, of course, the Giant Sequoia at almost 100 meters in height, but there are also larger organisms: a grove aspen in Utah covers 100 acres (and weighs 6000 tons), and a fungus in Oregon covers 2200 acres. If one moves to superorganisms, there is a giant ant colony in Japan with over 300 million ants occupying almost 3 square kilometers, and there is the belief that there is one mega-colony connecting ants in Japan, California and Europe. And there is the Gaia Theory, which contends that the Earth itself is a single organism - the largest of all.

10^2
This is the scale of big buildings - not necessarily the biggest, but the substantial structures that make up the modern city. It is also the scale of the circus. Circuses were a lifelong fascination for the Eameses. In fact, in the late 1940's, when Charles's daughter, Lucia, was filling out college applications, she asked Charles what to write in the space marked “Father's Occupation.” Charles responded, “Clown.” Years later, Charles and Ray made a training film called Clown Face, 1971, for Ringling Brothers’ Clown College. This scale is also the scale of the Wright Brothers’ first flights on December 17, 1903 - 37, 53, 61, and 275 meters, respectively, occurring just 3 years after they began their experiments. One of the reasons the Wright Brothers conquered flight (and this scale) where others had failed is due to the rigorous way they attacked the problem - they also understood bicycles. When we consider the problem of “manned, controlled, powered flight”, we might consider the challenge implied by each word in that phrase to be just about equal. But the Wright Brothers realized right away that control was going to be their biggest problem. According to Wright Brothers biographer Tom Crouch, Wilbur “believed that the operator of any vehicle ought to have a means of controlling the motion of his craft in every available axis. An idea firmly implanted by his experience as a cyclist.” Other pioneers, Langley for instance, felt that the best approach was to remove the roll control from the pilot for fear it would be too much to deal with. Wilbur’s view reveals an important kind of faith in himself and others - a view that led to their ultimate success.

10^3
This is the scale of the town or village - or the neighborhood of today’s modern city. It is also the scale of the everyday heroics of engineering. Jawahar Gidwani, a seismic engineer, has been in charge of retrofitting the Golden Gate Bridge in order to ensure its survival in the event of a major quake. One parameter of the job: the bridge had to be kept open throughout the retrofitting no matter what problems were addressed. The first step was to determine what the effects of an earthquake would be on the bridge’s massive span; the conclusion: the towers (roughly 10^03 meters apart) are so far from each other that they essentially would experience different earthquakes because the seismic waves would hit them at different times. The computer model that Gidwani used has the ability to show not only what will happen if one member fails, it also can show where it may be about to fail. This non-linear analysis is closer to the real world: after a quake, the models can be run with the same data as the quake to guide inspectors to places of particular stress. In the end, the computer modeling showed that the archway of the bridge was in good shape. In fact, in such good shape that, in the event of an earthquake, parts of the bridge would smash into each other at increasingly high speeds with potentially devastating results. So, in the end, the key recommendation was to build massive shock absorbers. Clocks help us to understand this scale in time. Even without the atomic clock, precision in timekeeping has improved dramatically over the past 500 years. The critical breakthrough to bringing the precision of the clock into this scale of reliability was the move from a spring-wound verge escapement to the gravity-driven pendulum clock. Before then, clocks lost too much time too quickly to be taken seriously on a minute-to-minute basis. Like it or not, with the pendulum clock and its successors, the minute has became a meaningful increment of daily life - and living in the modern city.

10^4
As we take the Powers of Ten journey, by the time we get to 10^04 meters, we are higher than Mount Everest (not to mention, Mount McKinley), and by the time we get to 10^05, we are much higher than the distance between the top of Everest and the bottom of the ocean. Between those two extremes is found all the richness that we experience of our planet. This scale inspires some questions. How are we able to describe the shape of the Earth, depict the character of its contours? Why do we feel confident about the detail presented in a map? Probably because of one of humankind’s most fundamental tools: exploration. Hiking, walking, trudging distances measured in kilometers: people who want to see for themselves, people who want to get a handle on the specifics of the locale. The presence of these explorers has served at least one useful function: a certain level of confidence in our mapping of the areas in question. Exploration forces us to push the boundaries of understanding even further out. Today, for better or worse, most places on Earth at the scale of a kilometer have been visited by somebody. The few that have not been are shrouded in an alluring mystery. Part of the way we as humans like to understand the world is through tactile exploration, even if it is simply through the experience of someone else. Satellite pictures will never be enough because they only allow you to predict the qualities of an unfamiliar place in terms of the world already known; being there demands that you describe the new world on its own terms.

10^5
Consider this power of ten from the standpoint of time: 10^05 seconds (100,000 seconds: 27.7 hours) - approximately a day, the smallest wholly natural measure of time. A second or an hour means little to nature, but a day is the time frame it takes for the Earth to fully rotate on its axis. However, like all time frames today, the most precise description of a day is not found in the nature we see with the naked eye, but in the vibrations of the atomic clock. A day defined by the rotation of the Earth is less accurate because the Earth is slowing down - rotating slower and slower each year. Every day is about 15 microseconds longer than the same day of the previous year. The rhythm of the day and its place in the longer stream of time is rarely felt or understood as well as by those who keep a daily journal. Henry David Thoreau, author of the extraordinary Walden: or Life in the Woods, kept a daily journal for most of his life. Though, in a sense all journals insist on their own slice of time, Thoreau actually used those journals as grist for his other writings and to understand his experiences more completely. On July 4, 1845, Thoreau moved into a small house he had built on the shore of Walden Pond near Concord, Massachusetts; he lived there for 2 years 2 months and 2 days. It was on land owned by Ralph Waldo Emerson, and the cabin cost him $28.12 to build. Since he only had to spend 27 cents a week for food and necessities, a couple of months of work as a surveyor covered his expenses. This freed him to concentrate on observing the ebb and flow of nature, and watch the ways in which the universe revealed itself in the small world of this pond and its rhythms. This experience also led to a series of lectures which, along with the literal entries into his journal from his time spent at the pond, evolved into the book Walden. Thoreau published a book in 1849 entitled A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers. A thousand copies were printed, but very few were sold, and Thoreau was forced to buy the remainder; the upside being that it allowed him to write in his journal, “I have now a library of nearly 900 volumes, over 700 of which I wrote myself.” When it came time for him to publish Walden no one would take the book. Over the intervening 5 years Thoreau revised it extensively. One scholar has pointed out that the failure of the first book inadvertently gave Thoreau the time required to rewrite and revise Walden into the classic it became after its publication in 1854.

10^6
10^06 is the scale of nations and continents. One way to understand this scale is to consider the work of Archimedes, generally regarded as one of the first great physicists. He lived and died in the 3rd century B.C. in the city of Syracuse, a Greek colony on the island of Sicily. He made many key contributions to our understanding of the world, including the Archimedes Principle. It is said that, after discovering the principle while taking a bath, he allegedly ran down the streets of Syracuse stark naked screaming, “Eureka!” (or “I have found it!”). Whether or not this story is true, his discovery was worthy of great excitement. The Archimedes Principle states that an object placed in water will displace an amount of water equal in weight to what the object would weigh in air. This came up in the context of determining, without damaging the crown itself, whether the king’s new crown had been made of pure gold or had been tampered with. Archimedes was really the first person we have on record to attempt to use very large numbers. His essay The Sand Reckoner asserts that any quantity, as long as it has some definition, can be brought to Earth by mathematics; he built from the ground up a new mathematical system in base 1,000,000. In a sense, Archimedes was always thinking about this scale - a scale known to him, a scale whose rules he was attempting to understand. He and other scientists of his time provided the groundwork which makes so much modern understanding possible, and explains many things in our everyday experience - things which we now take for granted, forgetting that these familiar things were and are subject to scrutiny by science. Archimedes also planted a seed which continues to bear fruit to this day: his use of mathematics to prove and explain physical principles. He tried to use logic and the beauty of math to order the world, no differently, in a sense, than modern day physicists C.N. Yang or Paul Dirac.

10^7
The scales of time and space echo each other here at 10^07. 10 million meters, or 10,000 kilometers, is the scale of the diameter of the Earth. 10 million seconds is 115.7 days - roughly the time scale of the season, one of the natural rhythms of our Earth. Unfortunately, when we think of the scale of the Earth, it is hard not to think about the unhealthiness of the planet and how so many of the powers of ten converge at the global scale; and yet, this too is an important aspect of Powers of Ten thinking. Scale is the New Geography. In order to be a good citizen of the world in this day and age, we must understand scale. Most of the problems the world faces these days are problems of scale, and yet the human mind is not really set up to understand exponential change. We can comprehend linear growth quite well. And we are familiar with our local scale, but beyond that it can get a bit vague. One of the purposes of this exhibition - and all our Powers of Ten work at the Eames Office - is to give people more and more experiences and information that build off of the original film so that they may have a better intuitive understanding of scale. Armed with that, over time, the blizzard of numbers and information we all face will begin to make more and more sense. So back to our planet: think of global warming. There is nothing really wrong with carbon dioxide per se, but the scale of the volume we are producing as humans is threatening to change the climate irreversibly (or more accurately: irreversibly in a time scale that permits the survival of the human species). Carbon dioxide is tiny (10^10 or so) - 17 orders of magnitude smaller than the Earth - but in quantity (we now have 2000 gigatonnes [2 x 10^12 tons] in our atmosphere) and heated by the Sun at 10^12, it threatens our ability to ever be guests or hosts again at the human scale.

10^8
In terms of space, 10^08 is 100,000 kilometers or the distance that the earth travels in one hour. The Earth, the third planet from the Sun, and the fifth largest planet, orbits the Sun at an average distance of 93 million miles. If the weather balloon (8 feet in diameter) hanging from our ceiling was the size and scale of the Earth, then the Sun would be about 800 feet in diameter. Centered here, one edge would be almost to Lincoln Boulevard and the other just shy of 11th. Even Jupiter - at 80 feet, 10 times the diameter of the Earth - would not fit in this room. But size is only one part of the story. If this weather balloon was the size of the Earth, then that 800-foot Sun would actually be 16 miles away - in Palos Verdes Estates (just south of Torrance). And that 80-foot Jupiter would be 65 miles north (that’s running more than 2 marathons) in the Tejon Pass, right at the Frazier Park turnoff. And if this weather balloon was the size of the Earth, poor, demoted Pluto, would be a bit bigger than a beach ball and be sitting on the California/Oregon border about 650 miles away. Now let’s imagine our weather balloon is not the size and scale of the Earth, but instead is the size of the Sun. In this case, the Earth would be a bit smaller than a pinball, and Jupiter, about the size of a bowling ball. One million pinballs could fit into our weather balloon - which is what you would expect, because the Sun has the volume of a million Earths.

10^9
The physical scale of the Moon resonates in time and space. For humans, it represents the monthly cycle we track through calendars. As a physical object, it is our closest celestial neighbor - except for temporary ones like meteorites and catastrophic asteroids. An everyday (literally) tool that has evolved from the scale of the Moon is the calendar. We keep track of the passing days with calendars and when we mark a date seven days away for dinner with a friend, the task of the calendar seems fairly simple and easy enough: to keep track of the intervening days so that we will remember the engagement. However, the impressive work of the Gregorian calendar, the one used to one degree or another by most of the world today, lies in rhythms at a much slower pace: the leap days and leap seconds that keep the calendar in synch with sidereal time. Sidereal time is astronomical time as measured out by the stars. The goal of human efforts is to find sidereal time, and then keep it in some way. Our clocks and calendars are tools we have evolved to help us do this. The Gregorian Calendar adds one extra day in years divisible by 4 except in years ending in 100 that are not divisible by 400. These rules keep civil and sidereal time quite close. But time is such a part of our lives that we feel a fierce attachment to these hours and days, as we have named them, even though the amount of time would pass in the same way even without our labels. The depth of the attachment can be seen by considering Bristol, England in 1752 when England finally adopted the Gregorian calendar. An adjustment of 11 days was required so that time in Great Britain would be governed by a calendar connected to sidereal time. In that year, the day after September 2 was September 14th. Despite laws designed to make sure no unfair advantage was taken, people rioted in the streets, demanding their 11 days “back.” Several people were killed in the Bristol time riots.

10^10
Patience is a critical tool for study at every power of ten and, indeed, in the journey of understanding. Few projects exhibit the need for patience more spectacularly than the study of a plant that can live almost 300 years (about 3 x 10^10 seconds) - long outliving any human researcher. Betsy Pierson is the third major researcher to take on the study of the Saguaro cactus that doesn’t even start to flower for 40 years. In 1903, the original researcher, Forrest Shreve, created a map of all the Saguaro cactus on Tumamoc Hill in the Carnegie Desert Laboratory (then a good ways outside of Tucson, Arizona). Some of the Saguaro he catalogued had been alive at the time of the American Revolution! In 1962, biologist Ray Turner conducted a follow-up census, numbering and describing precise physical condition of each recorded cactus as well as any new cactus. The baton was then passed to Pierson, who did her own follow-up census in 1994. Each researcher has to plan for the next census decades in the future. But more than 100 years later, the results are invaluable; very few studies are capable of showing such long-term trends. Ironically, at a time when we are more and more curious about the long-term health of our environment, such long-term studies are harder to fund because they do not offer the funder or the researcher the instant gratification of a quick result. In the intervening decades, the city of Tucson has grown to the edges of the preserve. A special kind of patience will need to be shown by the people of Tucson; they will need to refrain from exploiting the reserve as a park, and instead choose to let it be a natural environment, taking its course, gently observed. Yet another kind of patience was exhibited by Marie Curie as she slowly extracted her first gram of radium from the pitchblende; and still another by astronomers waiting for the light to arrive from distant stars. Patience is an irreplaceable tool.

10^11
The three arcs that you see represent the paths traveled by three planets; the green arc represents the six-week-long path traveled by the Earth each September and October. The other two paths are of Earth’s closest neighbors: Mars and Venus. This power of ten in space obliges us to consider days and weeks; this power of ten in time obliges us to consider millennia. 10^11 seconds add up to 3,170 years. The great mathematician Omar Khayyam pondered this scale in two ways, one overt and one less so. First, he pioneered a redesign of the Muslim calendar (although the modern lunar-based Muslim calendar is not his work); he came up with a 33-year cycle of rhythms and leap years (actually a little more accurate than the modern calendar we use today) that he called the Jalili era after the Sultan. The way to conceptualize such a long expanse of time, at least in the world of calendar reform, is to imagine slowly turning cycles that take so long to repeat that in each case they file off small imperfections in the calendar’s precision. Khayyam’s calendar loses a day every 5000 years (as opposed to 3,333 years for the Gregorian calendar). Khayyam also considered this scale of time in a way he might have been surprised to have others notice. Looking back from his 11th century vantage point, he was aware of more than 20 centuries worth of man’s assaults on the riddles of natural order. Like many Arab scientists of his day, Khayyam, was truly the custodian of humankind’s accumulated knowledge, even at a time when virtually every European institution was vulnerable to oblivion in the Dark Ages. Although they were clearly more than just care takers, Khayyam and others seem to have been aware of this cultural responsibility - adding to that knowledge as well; although much of his work has been lost, Khayyam made several contributions to algebra. Khayyam was a free thinker - suspected by more doctrinaire Muslim religious leaders of his time. When the Vizyr offered a lucrative position at court to Khayyam, he turned it down, asking instead to work quietly at the observatory at Isfahan, in present day Iran (where he compiled an important star chart). Today, Khayyam is best known as a poet, which again reminds us that not all cultures have felt such a stern divide between practitioners of art and science.

10^12
Nicholas Copernicus was the canon of Frombork Cathedral in Poland. While never a priest, he was trained in Padua, Bologna, Krakow, and Ferrara, and freely pursued his astronomy to tremendous effect. In the year of his death - 1543 - at the age of 70, his friend and colleague - the mathematician Joachim Rhetics - urged him to finally publish his groundbreaking manuscript, De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium (On the Revolutions of Celestial Spheres). For the 1500 years before Copernicus, people had been following the work of Ptolemy, who had worked out the mechanics of an Earth centered universe; a bit unsatisfactorily because few followed the system because of growing inaccuracies, In fact, through the use of wheels on wheels called epicycles (meaning that as a planet orbited the Earth, it had another, smaller, circle it was said to travel simultaneously within that orbit), it did an evidently passable job of predicting where the planets would be. As time went on, however, the inaccuracies became more and more grating on astronomers. Even now, nearly 5 centuries later, Copernicus’ book is still remarkable in three ways. Firstly, it is a book that changes the model: the Sun is moved to the center of the solar system and the Earth is reduced to a status equal to that of the other planets. Secondly, it reflects the essence of the way the solar system works far more accurately than Ptolemy’s model. Thirdly, it is a book that, through its details, reveals that it was written by a man with a refined sense of space. Ironically, what Copernicus’ own book is not is the last word on the “Copernican” system. It took the combined efforts of Brahe, Kepler, Galileo, and, ultimately, Newton, to shape that system coherently - there were just too many dimensions still to be worked out in Copernicus’s original proposition. Copernicus was not necessarily ready to take on the world. And, for a time, there was an awkward ceasefire between the Catholic Church and the Copernican theory, based on the fiction that Copernicus did not challenge the Earth-centric view, he just made predictions easier. But the subsequent battle with Galileo demonstrated the incompatibility of the two views, and it is this essence of the idea that we are honoring when we speak of the Copernican Revolution.

10^13
Johannes Kepler spent many years visualizing and understanding the motions of the planets. Believing, as many did, in the purity of circles, he was reluctant to describe their motions in any other way, but gradually he went where the data took him and realized that they were ellipses. Kepler’s story is interwoven with that of Tycho Brahe, who was undoubtedly the greatest pre-telescopic observer of the heavens. Brahe had caused a stir when he showed that a new object in the sky (now known as a supernova), first seen in 1572, was not, as everyone else said, a comet or something near by, but in fact a star. It was a disturbing fact because it meant the distant heavens could change. A few years later, Brahe built his observatory Uraniborg, on the island of Hven in Denmark, where he kept extraordinarily detailed records of his precise observations of stars and planets through the end of that century. In January of the epochal sounding year of 1600, Kepler started working for Brahe as his assistant. Kepler was not even there the whole of the time until October of 1601, when Brahe died and yet that overlapping window is critical to the history of astronomy. In fact, it is hard to imagine anyone in the world who could have used Brahe’s rigorously precise information better. Ironically, Brahe never accepted the Copernican system. Indeed his proposal was that some planets revolved around the Sun which revolved around the Earth. Brahe’s system may show that there’s no such thing as halfway on such matters. Taken together, Brahe’s results (which were exhaustive and exhausting over 2 decades - organized by Kepler along with some supplements of his own) finally became a separate publication called the Rudolphine Tables (1627). Despite the invention of the telescope, their precision was relied on for the next hundred years, and Kepler perceived in them his famous Laws of Planetary motion. Kepler succeeded Brahe as Imperial Mathematician to Emperor Rudolph II. Kepler spent the next several years working on Astronomia Nova--The New Astronomy (1609) wherein he published the first 2 of his famous three laws of planetary motion (the last he published in 1619). Please watch the Eames Film about them on the monitor to learn more. The significance of this last law becomes most clear when Newton formulated his law of gravity. Kepler determined all these laws by applying his mind to the observations of the heavens. He had a gift for and fascination with patterns. He devoted much energy to attempting to determine the musical qualities of the planets and to the Mysterium Cosmographicum, a series of geometric solids (shown at this station) on the interior of which were inscribed successive spheres that held the orbits of the planets. He was intrigued by possibilities of the stars affecting the lives of men, but to call him a plain and simple astrologer is to deliberately misread him. In fact, his standards were sufficiently exacting that, as astronomer Owen Gingerich has pointed out, “in some respects, Kepler was the astrologer who killed astrology.”

10^14
When Charles Eames gave the Charles Eliot Norton lectures in Poetry at Harvard University, he shared the fact that his first childhood memory was of being summoned to view an ambassador from the scale of 10^14 meters - Halley’s Comet. Like many of the shorter interval comets (shorter interval by cosmic standards - a human lifetime by ours), the orbit of Halley’s goes way beyond the orbit of Pluto and the other dwarf planets.

10^15
Though we are beyond the 8 (or so) planets of the traditional solar system, there are objects here that are still within the thrall of the Sun’s gravitational pull. Although it is weaker here - no question (gravity falls off exponentially) - the longer interval comets and other objects are still centered around the Sun. This understanding is the legacy of Isaac Newton, unquestionably one of the greatest scientists who ever lived, only the likes of Darwin and Einstein, perhaps Archimedes or Aristotle even come close in terms of impact on our understanding of the world. The publication of Newton’s Principia (complete title in English: Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy) in 1687 may be considered the beginning of modern science. Although he himself said, “if I have seen so far it is because I have stood on the shoulders of giants,” he did, in fact, see very much further than they had. Here is an incomplete list of accomplishments: Newton invented and articulated the law of universal gravitation, invented calculus (along with Leibniz, independently), was a gifted experimentalist, discovered the color spectrum, contributed extensively to optics, explained the role of the Moon in ocean tides, wrote extensively on mystical and religious themes, corrected certain aspects of Galileo’s and Kepler’s work and coalesced it all into a dynamic explanation of the solar system, invented the reflector telescope and discovered the 3 laws of motion: 1) that a body will stay at rest or continue in uniform motion unless acted upon by an external force (the law of inertia); 2) that F=ma; Force equals Mass times Acceleration; 3) that every action has an equal and opposite reaction. The breadth of his accomplishments is extraordinary and its roots in experiment equally so. Newton formulated our understanding of classical mechanics - the behavior of objects in the world around us - in a way that was unchallenged for more than 200 years. People have claimed that in the early 20th century some of Newtonian physics was overturned; indeed, the field of quantum mechanics explained the world of the atom. But overturned is too strong a word. Why? To look at it in a Powers of Ten way, Newtonian mechanics seem to successfully govern the behavior of matter in all the positive powers of ten (not just here at 10^15, but all the way to 10^26) and all the micro powers down to, say, 10^-10. That is an extraordinary range; that some correction was needed somewhere is not surprising. One important aspect to Newton’s work is the way he approached problems. Science historian, I.B. Cohen, has called Newton’s thinking process the Newtonian Style, and has examined it in considerable depth: Newton would begin with a purely mathematical system (for example, a mass-point in orbit around a center of force), examine its behavior, scrutinize it logically for implications. Then, in phase 2, he would compare it with the relevant real world system (say, the Earth and the Moon), note and correct those aspects where the original construct did not hold, modify the model system, and take this new product, the modified model system (now, say it is 2 mass-points interacting with each other), examine it logically, mathematically, and so on until it too is compared with the real world and so on adding complexity (say, another planet) at each phase. The Newtonian Style as described by Professor Cohen has an exceptionally modern feel, but it is supported by contemporary evidence. At every scale, this modeling provided a remarkable feedback loop.

10^16
10^16 meters is an important landmark in space - 1 light-year, the distance a beam of light can travel in a year. But because it falls outside our Sun’s gravitational pull, and we are not yet at the next star, we will also consider this power of ten in time from a perhaps unexpected source: the work of biologist Charles Darwin. Darwin’s biological exploration demanded what has since been revealed: vastly more geologic time in which the forces of natural selection could operate. Because of the subtly incremental processes he perceived, he envisaged time scales like we find at 10^16 seconds or 317,097,919 years. From 1831 to 1836, Darwin was the naturalist aboard the HMS Beagle which conducted a scientific survey of South America, its islands, and areas in the South Pacific. During this time he studied and examined many different organisms and habitats, but he was particularly fascinated by those plants and animals which had developed on islands, because there seemed to be species on the islands closely related to those on the mainland, and within some island groups, distinct species on each island. Over the next twenty years, Darwin revisited these and other clues as he reworked and refined his theory of evolution by means of natural selection. In 1842, Darwin began living in Kent, England where he bred pigeons and other birds. He also, as he said, “allowed himself to speculate on the problem of the origin of species,” in other words, how different species came to be developed. He explored the issue of natural selection in part by piecing together some of his experience as a breeder and by returning to his observations of species in habitats around the world. By 1844, he had drawn up a kind of sketch which contained the heart of his theory of evolution. What the theory proposed, dramatically borne out by the next century-and-a-half of biological research, is that evolution proceeds by means of natural selection, commonly called “survival of the fittest” - meaning that in each generation only those that were strong enough to survive until they reproduced would be the ones whose traits survived. To put it another way: natural selection means that if you imagine a population of organisms before any of them have any offspring, you will see that nature, whether by predators, disease, vulnerability to the Sun - whatever, kills off some of those individuals. Then if you take those surviving individuals and observe their offspring, you will only see those traits of the survivors and no traits from the ones weeded out (unless the survivors had them too). Natural selection means that over time, certain traits that tend to be represented more in the surviving groups will dominate the population. The process is called evolution and it never stops, because only a limited population can survive in any given habitat and, so, Nature is always looking for an edge. For a given trait, it comes down to a simple question: was the individual possessing this trait able to reproduce? If the answer tends to be no, then the trait will tend to disappear; if the answer tends to be yes, then the trait will tend to survive. You can see what a gradual process it was that Darwin conceived, requiring hundreds of millions of years. Despite his early start, it took almost 15 years for Darwin to submit a paper outlining the theory, because he wanted to fine tune it further. Interestingly, one of the weak links he found in his own theory, was the fact that by all logic it would require many generations for natural selection to take place which would in turn take a great deal of time - amounts of time that greatly exceeded how old the Earth was thought to be at that time. It seems clear, though, that Darwin felt that the time would be found. Darwin presented his theory of natural selection in 1858 when his paper was read to the Linnean Society in London (at the same time as Alfred Wallace’s similar paper, though on work started long after Darwin’s), then within a year he published Origin of Species. The deadline and the awareness of Wallace’s work proved to be quite a catalyst. As Julian Huxley has said “The Origin was written in the short space of little over a year and was the product of a white heat of urgency working on the fruits of 22 years industry and reflection.”

10^17
Fossils are the preserved remains of dead organisms - generally the hard remains of the organism, such as bone, shell, or trunks of trees - but also more delicate evidence such as tracks, impressions, and, rarely, but remarkably, even the soft tissue of animals and plants. Fossils are one of the key tools for understanding and imagining the world of 10^17 seconds ago - and several orders of magnitude more and less. There are some tremendous deposits of fossils from locales in time and space where clearly the conditions were so perfect that not only can a species be studied, but also an entire population. This tends to happen particularly with marine creatures, as in the Burgess Shale, where whole populations of heretofore unknown life-forms were preserved en masse. Very rarely do you see a fossil whose fossilization began on a rocky outcropping because a sedimentary grave is required. There is also a whole discipline of micropaleontology which uses the fossils themselves to date the stratigraphy (or geologic layers in the rock). Fossils of Glossopteris, a carboniferous plant, now extinct, were discovered in Antarctica, South America, Africa, and Australia, providing important evidence in piecing together the great puzzle of plate tectonics. Given how much we rely on fossils to look into the past, it is worth remembering how serendipitous their existence is, requiring the dead organism to come to rest in sediment that remains sufficiently undisturbed that minerals can slowly leach into the bone and effect the transformation, long after the soft tissue has rotted away. This means that the fossil record is spectacularly uneven in its completeness, and that there may well have been organisms whose existence we will never know about. But, with the ones we do know, we are able to tell a remarkable story.

10^18
The telescope has contributed more to our understanding of the heavens than any other single physical tool. The implications of deep, deep space and the evident inadequacies of our naked eye observations to do justice to the multitude of objects out there were apparent even with early telescopes. This disparity and this tool, more than anything else, has left us little doubt that we inhabit the lower end of the spectrum of magnitude - with profound psychological consequences. There are two kinds of optical telescopes: refractors and reflectors. Galileo used a refractor when, based only on accounts of one in Holland, he constructed for himself a simple telescope in 1609. With this tube he realigned our vision of the heavens, seeing detail on our Moon, and moons around Jupiter. Refractors work by focusing light through a pair of lenses. The largest refractor in the world is the 40"; lens at Yerkes Observatory. They don’t get any bigger for a couple of reasons, all of which reduce the telescope’s scientific value: certain distortions become inevitable, the lens gets too heavy, and they tend to need extremely long focal lengths. Isaac Newton invented the reflector telescope in the late 1660s. This type of telescope uses a concave mirror to collect the light, and then concentrate it in a focal area where the light transmitting the image is diverted out of the telescope tube to the observer’s eye (except for the prime focus style where the astronomer actually gets into a cage within the telescope - obviously this only works for giant telescopes or small astronomers). All major telescopes today are descendants of Newton’s telescope. The 200” (the mirror’s diameter) telescope at Palomar and a Russian 240” telescope are about as big as single mirror telescopes will get. But, because the bigger the surface area of the mirror, the further you can see, everyone wants a bigger mirror. Two new approaches are being used. Multi-mirror telescopes use a collection of hexagonal mirrors whose light-collecting capabilities are pooled together and coordinated to create the equivalent of a single large mirror. And, in the New Technology telescopes, minute sensors and supports constantly correct and manipulate the surface of the mirror to sharpen the image and prevent distortion - effectively increasing their range. These telescopes observe the visible wavelengths of light, producing results which, when combined with those of other telescopes observing in non-visible wavelengths, give a rich picture of the skies.

10^19
The ultimate value of a star survey may never be known or fully appreciated by those who actually do it and, certainly, rarely while they are doing it. The real gift in designing one is to do it in such a way that others will be able to draw the data they need from it. It comes under the heading of preparation and rigor. The Digital Sky Survey, now underway, is therefore part of an honorable tradition of creating a tool for other astronomers as yet unknown. Historically, there are many such slices of astronomical data, including Kepler’s Rudolphine Tables that put Tycho Brahe’s painstakingly collected data into usable form in the 17th century, the Messier Catalogue whose 18th-century designations are still used today, or - and the list could easily be longer - Carl Seyfert’s systematic listing of certain peculiar galaxies in the 20th century. The last led directly to a better understanding of active galaxies, an unexpected bonus of a meaningful constraint. One point of a star survey is to create a baseline of understanding, preparing for the unexpected. In 1843, John Couch Adams started doing some calculations regarding perturbations in the orbit of Uranus - perturbations that he thought might be the result of another planet’s gravitational forces. After a time, he calculated where this new planet might be. The Astronomer Royal of England essentially dismissed the results. Meanwhile in France, Urbain Leverrier made similar calculations with quite similar results. Learning this, the Astronomer Royal scrambled to discover it, but with no good star maps or references, they wasted a good deal of time and had to methodically create the needed survey charts. Unfortunately for England, in September 1846, Leverrier wrote to a colleague at the Berlin Observatory, who armed with good charts discovered the planet (Neptune) the very day that he got the letter. Surveys of any kind, from the Domesday book to Forrest Shreve’s Saguaro map, are ideally a good faith effort to take a snapshot of what you do know so that you can be ready for what you don’t or, at the very least, see what you can learn when you compare it to the next snapshot.

10^20
One big challenge in astronomy is to measure cosmic distances. How do we know anything about objects 10 thousand light years away (10^20 meters)? This is emphatically a problem of scale. Though we can use triangulation by making two observations of the same object 6 months apart (in other words, when the Earth is at the two extremes of its orbit), this is only effective for measuring relatively short distances. For objects many thousands or millions of light-years away we cannot do anything active: we can’t run a tape measure, we can’t bounce a laser beam off them (like we do off the Moon). Instead, we must sift the information coming to us from the sky and see what clues are there. Standard candles are one of the critical ways we have found to help us measure cosmic distances. The principle, if not the application, is quite simple: if you could find an object whose luminosity (brightness) you knew absolutely just by looking at it, then, by comparing the apparent luminosity with the absolute luminosity, you could figure how far away it is. In 1912, Harvard astronomer Henrietta Leavitt discovered an extraordinarily consistent pattern: that certain stars with variable brightness followed a very strict relationship between their absolute luminosity and the period of their variable brightness - they’re known as Cepheids after the constellation in which they were first discovered. It was the discovery and understanding of the Cepheids that proved critical for Edwin Hubble’s work which placed us in the cosmos. Today there are a handful of other standard candles useful for even greater distances, including very bright red giant stars and supernovas. Although a lot of effort has been put into standard candles in particular and cosmology in general, we remain far away from these objects that we discuss with such confidence. Do we discuss them with too much confidence? In the book Origins by Alan Lightman and Roberta Brawer, cosmologist Edwin Turner shared bittersweet feelings about the spacecraft Voyager’s discoveries about Saturn and its rings. He points out that the rings were a celestial feature studied as well, if not better, than any other single feature in the universe and yet, when Voyager finally got out there, there were fundamental aspects we knew nothing about. Turner’s remark is a cautionary one. After all, to us these stars seem like just points of light, and we know from our own star, the Sun, how much richness is implied in every one of them.

10^21
What does the Milky Way have to with the Eames film Tops? The public premiere of this film took place when Charles and Ray’s friend Philip Morrison, the narrator of the Powers of Ten film, was giving a lecture on rotating galaxies to a conference of astrophysicists. At the conclusion of the lecture he said he wanted to show them something else that behaved in just the same way - and presented Tops. We have focused a lot on the science, the design, and even the people studying the Powers of Ten. But there are other sieves through which to look at scale - and that is structural. For example, look at the dramatic, great spiral of the Milky Way galaxy image above. This is just one of so many that exist at all scales. The Milky Way is a spiral, as is the most fundamental encoding of ourselves - DNA. The Greeks saw in the spiral the Golden Mean, the most exalted geometric perfection. Fibonacci, an Italian mathematician, saw in it the Fibonacci series, a series where each number is the sum of the two before it (1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, etc.). The math of that pattern is what makes a spiral. This pattern, like some of the others, is a crude sieve that sorts the richness of all the scales for the presence of spirals. Like many of the patterns, it could be an exhibition unto itself.

10^22
In the mid-1970s, Vera Rubin began to study the rotation speeds of galaxies in an effort to understand why galaxies have different shapes (spirals, spheroids, irregular, etc). Since galaxies are vast collections of stars, nebulae, and other material, Rubin thought a good starting point would be to study the orbital patterns of stars in various portions of the disk at a range of distances from the center. After observing about 20 (and then 40, 100 and so on), Rubin noticed that the line was straight: meaning that the stars near the center of the disk, the ones half to the edge, and the ones at the edge of the galactic disk were all traveling at the same speed. [The result that was expected was something more familiar, like our own solar system, where those masses close to the center - like the planet Mercury - orbit quite fast (88 days), while by the time you get out to a planet like Pluto it takes 248 years for it to circle the Sun.] In our solar system’s terms, Rubin’s result was a bit like finding out that Pluto and Earth both orbited the Sun at Mercury’s rate: 88 days. Taking it further, this straight line (the consistent speed through the disk) meant that what looked like the edge of the galaxy was in fact not the end of its mass at all, only the edge of that portion of the disk that radiated light. Something else was out there, some very significant amount of otherwise unobservable mass. Vera Rubin had discovered dark matter. After thousands of years of astronomy, it turned out that we had been studying only 10% of the universe (reckoned by mass) all along. [By the way, this dark matter is completely different in a conceptual - and probably in a physical way too - from the substance known as “the missing matter” which is the amount of matter we have not detected by any means, but is needed in order for omega to equal 1 in the inflationary model. Press accounts often erroneously lump them together.] Rubin believes that the role of the observer, meaning the observational astronomer, is to confound the theorist. She points out that many of the most mind-bending objects that exist in astronomy had to be observed rather than theorized about - this includes quasars, gamma ray bursters, and even the dark matter, although cosmologist Jeremiah Ostriker had some inklings of it. Despite her important contributions to science, or perhaps because of them, Vera Rubin has a profound humility regarding the amount of understanding modern science has. The rhythm of her life has a lot to do with the four or five days she spends at Kitt Peak Observatory each spring for her observations. She has gone out of her way to choose fields which are not overflowing with scientists. She does not find the competition between scientists rewarding for its own sake, and prefers to carefully and thoughtfully pursue her own path. Ironically, this has landed her right in the midst of controversy a number of times. This may, in turn, confirm her instinct that so much remains to be done and observed in the universe that there’s no reason to select a field where too many other people are working.

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Edwin Hubble made a number of critical contributions to cosmology, each alone was a spectacular contribution, taken together they suggest a man who did much of the scouting and reconnaissance for the rest of the field. Cosmologist George Smoot has suggested that our time will be thought of as a great Age of Exploration, comparable to the sailing voyages of discovery in the 1500’s; if this is so, then Edwin Hubble will have to be considered a leading navigator. Why? First, in 1923, Hubble proved that the Andromeda Galaxy was not a nebula within our Milky Way, but rather an independent galaxy 2.2 million light years distant. He showed that our Milky Way galaxy was no longer the center of the universe which gave us some sense of the true scale of our cosmic neighborhood. Second, he later showed that all of the galaxies in the universe are moving away from each other. This means that the universe is expanding. In connection with that he also developed something called Hubble’s Law, which states that v=HoD. In other words, the speed with which a galaxy is moving away from us equals its distance from us times the Hubble constant. Although the value of Hubble’s constant was calculated by Sandage and Tamman to be approximately 50 Kilometers per second per megaparsec, there are some scientists who feel that this value is far too low. In any event, the important thing is that we seem to have a constant, regardless of what its value turns out to be. The value of that number is extremely important, because it tells us how fast the universe is expanding and how far away extremely distant galaxies are. It also can lead directly to a calculation of the age of the universe. Because our knowledge of the universe is still at an early stage, in a sense too many values hinge on this single clue. Any results that either confirm or suggest a change in that value will obviously have profound consequences, but given how much can seem to hinge on that one result, one must be cautious in extrapolating from it. Hubble also developed the classification scheme for galaxies that is still used today. [A brief word about a tool which Hubble developed, and a tool used by astronomers today: the red shift. The red shift is a prediction of Einstein’s general theory of relativity and is basically a visual version of the Doppler effect that one senses every time a horn honks in a passing car. The sound appears to change to the stationary listener, but in fact, at the source, sound is constant. With the red shift, the light from galaxies moving away from the Earth is stretched towards the red end of the spectrum (longer wavelengths). The degree to which it is stretched tells us the speed at which the galaxy is moving away from us and that, along with Hubble’s Constant, gives us the distance.]

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Probably one of the most important influences on the Powers of Ten film can be attributed to Eliel Saarinen, noted Finnish architect. Eliel was architect of the Cranbrook campuses in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, including Cranbrook Academy for Boys and was the head of Cranbrook Academy of Art where Charles went in 1938. There Charles studied, then taught, and was finally head of the Industrial Design department by the time he left in 1941. Saarinen had often stressed to Charles the importance of looking at things from the largest perspective - and the next smallest. Phrased another way, Saarinen instructed his architect son, Eero, to design for the “next largest context - a chair in a room, a room in a house, a house in an environment, an environment in a city plan.” The concept of exponential growth occurs often in Eames work - not only in the IBM Math Peep Show that we are screening called 2n (1961) [seen at power 10^17] and in sequences from A Communications Primer (1953). But as the Saarinen quote suggest, the origins of Powers of Ten for the Eameses goes back to that concept of always looking at things from the next larger frame of reference and the next smaller. The idea is to always challenge your perspective - check your assumptions. The last credit in both Rough Sketch and Powers of Ten says “With Gratitude to Kees Boeke.” Boeke was a noted educator in Holland during the post-war years. During the Norton lectures, Charles expressed his disappointment that they had not been able to work with Boeke on Rough Sketch which was inspired in part by Boeke's book, The Cosmic View, which Boeke had written with his students. To quote Ray, the book “suggested the possibility of bringing these ideas together in film.” Other films have been inspired by the same book, but the Eames vision was profoundly different. Owen Gingerich, an astronomy professor at Harvard University and colleague of the Eameses, once related the story of how his department voted on whether or not to buy a copy of one of these different versions or a second copy of Powers of Ten. The group voted nearly unanimously for the second copy. Interestingly, there is some evidence that an exhibit using a similar scalar approach was mounted at a museum in New York in the 1920's, but no persons in the above narrative ever saw it.

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In a series of papers published between 1905 to 1917, physicist Albert Einstein utterly revamped our fundamental understanding of the way the universe works. 1905 was a particularly spectacular year in which he published three critical papers. The first explained Brownian motion, the apparently random motion of particles that had first been observed in the early 19th century. Though somewhat more obscure than his other achievements, this particular insight had important consequences for atomic theory because it gave new specificity to calculations of atomic size. The second paper was on the photoelectric effect: this effect is what makes the modern video camera work (along with myriad other applications) and the understanding of this effect makes possible quantum mechanics. The photoelectric effect states that light comes in packets called quanta which, when striking an atom of certain substances, carry enough energy to cause the emission of an electron. The important implication is that light, which had been known to have a wave nature, has a particle nature as well. It is these particles - photons - which carry the electromagnetic force. Of course, Einstein is best known for relativity, and with good reason: it turns out to be a spectacular adjustment of our understanding of the world. He published it in two forms: a special theory in 1905 and a general one in 1917. The special theory states two things from which everything else can be drawn: first, all motion can be detected and measured only relative to an observer and second, the speed of light in a vacuum is a constant “c”. This applies to all physical phenomena except gravity. Although relativity is thought of as being a theoretical breakthrough, remember that it is based on observations of the world, not least of which is the fact that the speed of light in a vacuum is constant. No one had (or has) been able to measure it at any different speed. Another point regarding special relativity is that although one of its, at first unsettling implications, is that it is no longer possible to speak of simultaneity without considering the coordinate system of the observer, this sometimes gives rise to the feeling that there are no absolutes and that everything is relative. This is not the case; in fact Einstein does have absolutes, they are for him the essential absolutes: the speed of light and the notion that motion is relative to the observer. What he has reduced it to is the bare minimum of absolutes needed to derive everything else. After 1905 he went on to conclude that E=mc2, an expression now familiar to the point of parody, but it essentially means that energy and matter are merely different forms of one another and are interchangeable. In 1917 Einstein published his general theory of relativity. In a fundamental sense, this showed that relativity, which the special theory developed with regards to systems in uniform motion, also applied to systems undergoing acceleration, therefore with gravitation as well as all other physical phenomena. However, gravity is such a fundamental aspect of the universe, that including it actually turns out to mean that matter, through gravity, actually alters space and time. But equally important, Einstein showed that the behavior of the universe predicted by this general theory of relativity is substantially similar to classical (Newtonian) physics. A challenge for Einstein was to find observable cases where the two systems behave differently, and he did: it turned out that Newton’s work explained the motion all the planets except for a strange anomaly in the behavior of Mercury, close to the giant mass of the Sun. The general theory of relativity explains the (no longer) anomaly. Einstein also predicted a bending of starlight past the Sun which would be observable during an eclipse (otherwise the Sun would be too bright to see such stars). This was found in 1919, and since then the theory has been confirmed in many different ways. After that time Einstein worked on a grand unified field theory (whose articulation eluded him) as well as cosmological problems. He also contributed to the developmental discussions of quantum mechanics, but never felt comfortable with the role of uncertainty and chance within it. He is often quoted as saying, “God does not play dice with the universe.” But that should not be taken to mean he did not respect the work of quantum mechanics. Rather, he felt that the field of quantum mechanics was perfectly good at solving problems and modeling that realm, but he felt there must be a deeper understanding - as well there might be.

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The human mind is the tool we use to understand all scales. At the far extremes of time and space it may well be our only tool. Cosmologist Andrei Linde described to the Powers of Ten team his development of the chaotic inflation theory at a time when he still lived and worked in the Soviet Union (you can see it on one of the monitors at 10^17). At the time his story takes place, he and other Soviet scientists had been embargoed for about a year from publishing or traveling to scientific conferences. It was a time of deep pain for him. Suddenly with only a day’s notice he was given permission to attend an upcoming conference in Italy. So, when Linde says he thought about it for only half an hour, what he is saying must be placed in the context of years of work and thought preparing his mind for that moment. In the same way, Charles Darwin wrote The Origin of Species in a single year - but after decades of contemplation. Sometimes the human mind needs that cathartic push. Linde’s models of the early universe are extensions of his mind as he tries to address these extreme orders of magnitude. The human mind is an extraordinary tool with seemingly infinite applications: from the 19th century chemist who dreamed the structure of benzene as a snake chasing its tail, to the mathematician Galois who, the night before his fatal duel at the age of 21, wrote down the equations that became the foundation of Group theory, to Vincent van Gogh and The Starry Night. The fractal component of every tool used at every scale is the human mind as part of the essence of each and every means of discovery. Indeed, every scale is in every human mind and every human heart, and it is our hope that each image and idea in this exhibition is a chance for a kind of re-connection. Some are for you; some are for your companion; and some are for the stranger in the room with you. You have a completed a journey in scale which is your birthright as a human being living in both the shadow and the glow of centuries and millennia of human curiosity about this universe of ours that rewards the journey in and the journey out. It is an achievement and a beginning, a culmination and a starting point. Now we ask you, in this time of travail and opportunity, to reshuffle this step-by-step journey and make new connections between the scales. And specifically, this October, in the 10th month of the 10th year of this century, share these ideas with a friend or a community. And this Fall, join us by making your own journey of scale and posting it to our site to share with the world (10^07). These gifts of knowledge are, in their own way, gifts from the heart, and as this image of Gandhi, which the Eameses had at their studio, reminds us, there is a powers of ten in the human soul as well.

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