Things I Like - Science

The video below is 22 years old and was ground breaking in 1977 when it was made - it's still pretty cool. Keep in mind that Google Earth is less than a year old...

From Wikipedia:

"Powers of Ten" is a 1977 short documentary film written and directed by Ray Eames and her husband, Charles Eames. The film depicts the relative scale of the Universe in factors of ten…The film begins with an aerial image of a man reclining on a blanket; the view is that of one meter across. The viewpoint…then slowly zooms out to a view ten meters across..., revealing that the man is picnicking in a park with a female companion. The zoom-out continues …to a field of view of 1024 meters, or the size of the observable universe. The camera then zooms back in …to views of negative powers of ten—10−1 m (10 centimeters), and so forth—until the camera comes to a proton in a carbon atom at 10−16 meter.

I especially love the nucleus of the atom at .0001 angstroms (10 -14 m)...

Powers of 10

Note - the right edge of the video above is slightly cut off (due to blog format restrictions) and set to some new age music. You can see the original in full screen size with the voice over narrative at the official powers of 10 site.

http://www.powersof10.com/

Thanks to Christopher for the original link!