Cosmo-Porn of the Day: Scale of the Universe

[mckitterick]

The clearest and most cleverly designed look at scale - from the smallest to the largest - that I've ever seen. It's also great technical communication: clear, interesting, novel, unique, useful... you name it. Click the image and check out Cary and Michael Huang's "Interactive Scale of the Universe Tool" (takes just a few seconds to load on a high-speed connection):


Click the image to see the website.

It's interesting that the site's creators speculate that the universe is many times larger than the observable universe. I also love watching the scale of things explode as we fall in and in and in toward the smallest structures.

Cool beans!
Chris

Comments

[roya-spirit.livejournal.com]

That was neat! I'll have to look at it again on the larger monitor at home.

[shsilver.livejournal.com]

Very cool, like the old "Power of Ten" movie, although their diameter of Eris is a little out of date.

[mckitterick.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I loved that little movie (and used it in my Sci-Tech-SF course), though the interactive nature of this one makes it nicer in many ways.

[mckitterick.livejournal.com]

It's awesome on a big, high-res screen!

[holyoutlaw.livejournal.com]

Much fun!

[mckitterick.livejournal.com]

Isn't it, though?

[pamelonian.livejournal.com]

Love this! I passed it along to my aikido buddies, since we practice a meditation in which we visualize the infinitely large and then the infinitely small. They are basically the same. Must be that whole "infinity" thing...

[mckitterick.livejournal.com]

Ooh, this would be a great visual aid for such an exercise!

[karin-gastreich.livejournal.com]

That's just way cool, except...it would have been nice to include a couple levels of biological organization from the individual to the global scale (just thinking in terms of the classes I teach, I suppose).

But everything else was pretty awesome. Thanks for sharing!

[mckitterick.livejournal.com]

Ooh, good point. I loved seeing the scale of individual life, though; I mean, wow redwoods.

[siro-gravity.livejournal.com]

a SEVEN METER earth worm??? c'mon!!!

that is a really kewl tool! i enjoyed it a lot!

[mckitterick.livejournal.com]

That's one serious wurm.