| The Scale of the Universe | |
|---|---|
 Title screen of the first edition | |
| Developer | Cary and Michael Huang |
| Composers | |
| Engine | Adobe Flash |
| Platform | Web-based |
| Release | 2010 |
| Genre | Edutainment |
The Scale of the Universe is an interactive online visualization tool and website created in 2010 by twin brothersCary and Michael Huang. It features ascrollbar that can be used to navigate throughorders of magnitude and view various objects within such size ranges. Sliding the scrollbar to the left and right causes the screen tozoom in and out, respectively, usingresolution independence in the process.[1]
The Scale of the Universe displays a title screen that redirects to a white background with various objects, including ahuman and aplant. It has aslider on the bottom that canzoom in and out to see the scale of different objects such asasteroids and plants.[2][3] The further the user zooms in, the further down in scale it gets. The user can zoom in until thePlanck length is reached and visible, or zoom out until theobservable universe is in full view.[4][5][6]
Cary Huang first came up with the idea forThe Scale of the Universe in 2010 when his seventh-grade science teacher put up a video that compared the sizes of differentcells.[7] Cary said that he felt it was mesmerizing seeing larger ranges of different sizes, which inspired him to make and code the page.[8][1] Another inspiration was the online toolCell Size and Scale, which was created in 2008.[9]
Cary, along with his twin brother Michael, began development of the tool and released it later in 2010.[5] According to Cary, he usedastronomy books andWikipedia articles to help him scale the objects correctly.[10] At some point they also released other versions such as "wrong", in which the objects are randomly rescaled.[11]
In 2012, they released a new version calledThe Scale of the Universe 2, in which users can click on objects to seeinfoboxes with information about the object.[12][13][9]
The Scale of the Universe was featured onNASA'sAstronomy Picture of the Day on October 7, 2018.[14] In 2020, animation studioKurzgesagt released the appUniverse in a Nutshell, which took inspiration fromThe Scale of the Universe.[15]
Themain-belt asteroid10003 Caryhuang was officially named by theInternational Astronomical Union on June 16, 2021, partly in recognition of Cary's involvement inThe Scale of the Universe.[16]
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