220 : the powers of ten

I first saw The Powers of Ten in elementary school before I even knew who Charles & Ray Eames were. It was years later, while watching their short films that I realized the film I had watched oh-so-long-ago was by the famous duo.

The Powers of Ten depicts the relative scale of the universe in factors of ten. The film starts out with two people on a picnic blanket, and slowly zooms out at a rate of one power of ten per 10 seconds. The final zoom out is at 10²⁴ meters, which is the size of the observable universe. The camera then goes back to the people on the picnic blanket, and then into the negative powers of ten (so inside their bodies). The last stop is at 10⁻¹⁶ when the camera comes to quarks in a proton of a carbon atom.