| Powers of Ten | |
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-title-card.png) Title card for the 1977 version | |
| Directed by | Charles and Ray Eames |
| Based on | Cosmic View byKees Boeke |
| Narrated by |
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| Music by | Elmer Bernstein |
| Distributed by |
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Release date |
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Running time | 9 min |
| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
ThePowers of Ten are two short American documentary films written and directed byCharles and Ray Eames. Both works depict the relativescale of theuniverse according to anorder of magnitude (orlogarithmic scale) based on afactor of ten, first expanding out from the Earth until the entire universe is surveyed, then reducing inward until a single atom and its quarks are observed.
The first film,A Rough Sketch for a Proposed Film Dealing with the Powers of Ten and the Relative Size of Things in the Universe,[1] was a prototype and was completed in 1968; the second film,Powers of Ten: A Film Dealing with the Relative Size of Things in the Universe and the Effect of Adding Another Zero,[2] was completed in 1977.
ThePowers of Ten films were adaptations of the bookCosmic View (1957) byDutch educatorKees Boeke.[3] Both films, and a book based on the second film,[4] follow the form of the Boeke original, adding color and photography to the black and white drawings employed by Boeke in his seminal work.
The 1977 film has a number of changes from the prototype, including being entirely in color, moving the starting location fromMiami toChicago, removing the relativistic (time) dimension, introducing an additional two powers of ten at each extreme, a change in narrator from Judith Bronowski toPhilip Morrison, and much-improved graphics.[1]
This version of the film has two clocks in the corner showing the comparison between the viewer's time and that of Earth time. As the viewer's speed increases, Earth time, relative to the viewer, also increases.It was installed in the Smithsonian Institution'sNational Air and Space Museum's Life in the Universe gallery at the time of the museum's opening in 1976, until the gallery's closure in 1978.
There is also a 1968National Film Board of Canada film entitledCosmic Zoom which covers the same subject using animation. It is wordless, using sped-up music during the return trips to normal size.
The film begins with an overhead view of a man and woman picnicking in a park at theChicago lakefront — a 1-meter (3.3 ft) overhead image of the figures on a blanket surrounded by food and books they brought with them, one of them beingThe Voices of Time byJ. T. Fraser. The man (played by Swiss designer Paul Bruhwiler) then sleeps, while the woman (played by Eames staffer Etsu Garfias) starts to read one of the books. The viewpoint, accompanied byexpositoryvoiceover byPhilip Morrison, then slowly zooms out to a view 10 meters (33 ft) across (or101 meters inscientific notation). The zoom-out continues (at a rate of one power of ten per 10 seconds), to a view of 100 meters (330 ft) (where they are shown to be inBurnham Park,[5] nearSoldier Field, then 1 kilometer (3,300 ft) (where we see the entirety of Chicago), and so on, increasing the perspective and continuing to zoom out to a field of view of1024 meters, or a field of view 100 millionlight years across. The camera then zooms back in at a rate of a power of ten per 2 seconds to the picnic, and then slows back down to its original rate into the man's hand, to views of negative powers of ten: 10centimeters (10−1 meters), and so forth, revealing awhite blood cell and zooming in on it—until the camera comes toquarks in aproton of acarbonatom at10−16 meters.[1]
PhysicistRobbert Dijkgraaf noted: "It is a brilliant short documentary [...]. If I wanted to show an alien how we view the world, I would show this movie".[6]
In 1998,Powers of Ten, the 1977 version, was selected for preservation in the United StatesNational Film Registry by theLibrary of Congress as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant".[7][8]
He helped write the script and narrated the 1977 film "Powers of Ten," also by Charles and Ray Eames, in which a camera zooms from a couple having a picnic in Chicago out to the limits of the cosmos and then back down through the woman's hand to the level of atoms and quarks. In 1992, he and his wife, Phyllis, with the Eameses, turned it into a book.Correction: April 28, 2005, Thursday: An obituary on Tuesday about Dr. Philip Morrison, a Manhattan Project scientist who helped assemble the first atomic bomb and later campaigned against it, misstated the release date of "Powers of Ten," a film narrated and partly written by Dr. Morrison that takes viewers to the outer edge of the cosmos. It was released in 1968. (It was rereleased in 1977.)
41°51′53.93″N87°36′48.21″W / 41.8649806°N 87.6133917°W /41.8649806; -87.6133917
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| Included | Earth →Solar System →Local Interstellar Cloud →Local Bubble →Gould Belt →Orion Arm →Milky Way →Milky Way subgroup →Local Group→Local Sheet→Virgo Supercluster→Laniakea Supercluster →Local Hole →Observable universe →Universe Each arrow (→) may be read as "within" or "part of". |
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