A Short Lesson on Perspective

Powers of Ten is a short American documentary film written and directed by Ray Eames and her husband, Charles Eames in 1968. This film gives us a spacial scale of the universe by expanding and collapsing our perspective by powers of ten.

We live in a world of and created by numbers and models of reality built on these scales. A billion looks like this 1,000,000,000. That's a thousand millions or a million thousands depending on your perspective. Multiply that number by 6.9 and you have the estimated current World's population.

This formula explains how we define the radius of an electron.



See that 10 with the -15 super-scripted? That's scientific notation or a short way of writing this number so that it fits neatly on the screen of a calculator...

0.0000000000000028179402894(58) meters

Powers of Ten further elaborates to us just how incomprehensible these numbers actually are to the human mind.

If I were to look at you from 300 yards away with a telescope I would be unable to hear you, smell you, touch you, and my visual framing would exclude everything outside of my scope of vision. My understanding of you would therefore be superficial and poor at best. How valuable would my opinion of you really be?

Yet, this is more or less what we are forced to do given the complexity and the amount of control we all exert over our world. "The scientific Lifestyle" as David Byrne might say. Context and depth is truth and definition. Should we compromise our definition of our world in order to increase our scale of living?

We think asking this question is more important than avoiding it. Now without further ado, Powers of Ten.




Oh and if you still have more space in your brain, here is your extra credit video on perspective called, "Did you Know?" This is a more recent video which is at least 2 years old now about the progression of information technology and our world as perceived through it. This was created by Karl Fisch a High School Teacher in Centennial, Colorado. This is version 1.0 and there are 3 more updated versions since this one. Point being, this is weird stuff and the message is as confusing as the numbers themselves.

I personally recommend watching this video without sound and to keep in mind that this information is more than 2 years old already!