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Powers of Ten™ (1977)

Eames Office · 9.5M views · 2010-08-27 · 9:01

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Overview

The Eames Office's 1977 film Powers of Ten starts at a picnic in Chicago and zooms out by a factor of ten every ten seconds to the edge of the universe. It then zooms inward to a proton in a carbon atom.

On Hacker News

HN commenters recommend it as the classic visualization for building intuition about scale, and it comes up whenever a thread concerns scale or size comparisons.

Recommended by 9 HN people across 8 months · HN mentions 2012–2025

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Scientific method & science communicationCosmology & astrophysicsDocumentaries & storytelling
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What people said

vee-kay · 2025-11 · Strong recommendation

I think the video I have linked above is Google's tribute to this Power Of Ten video (linked below, thanks to user dtgriscom for sharing the link in another comment), a classic video that demonstrates the scale of the Universe from the micro to the macro perspectives in a scaling increase by a factor of ten for each scene. Power of 10: [VIDEO] Another relevant video (thanks to user christev for sharing the link): A Brief History of Geologic Time: [LINK] Absolutely humbling to realise how infinitesimally small and irrelevant our existence is, in the grand scheme of theme. Nature and science are amazing.

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coastflow · 2022-04 · Strong recommendation

To build intuition on scaling, the 1997 "Powers of Ten" video is an excellent resource that is still shown in introductory university physics lectures: [VIDEO]

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yogsototh · 2025-11 · Recommendation

I think there are a few movies that made me realize how much the space is vast, empty and adverse to life. I think it would be nice for people to take a look at them: - Aniara (2018) - High Life (2018) and maybe in a less artistic view: - Powers of Ten (1977) yt: [VIDEO]

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Sources

Video by Eames Office, played through YouTube.

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