The Universe ... and you

If you haven't taken a moment to sit in rapturous awe of the Universe today, now's your chance.

The Flash animation linked here is a little old—it seems to have been released back in January. But the result is so absolutely amazing that I felt the need to post it anyway. Designer Cary Huang has made an illustration of our place in the Universe that will give you vertigo and chills. In a good way. I don't often compare Flash animations to the lost, floating feeling you get when staring up at a light-pollution-free night sky that's so full of stars you can barely stand it ... but this gets close.

Thanks to warpwiz for making my day by Submitterating this.

Image: Some rights reserved by h.koppdelaney

• [Super Nate]

  I did blow it in that last one.

  1/6 pi x 10^738 Plank time lengths cubed

• [Larry7]

  that’s pretty amazing!!

  It would have been even better if he’d spelt metric terminology properly… (meters?? ugh)

  How many metres between the parking meters?

  • [sapere_aude]

    If you’ve got something against American spelling, blame Mr. Webster, not the guy who created this animation.

• [Jesse M.]

  Very cool, but as a physics nerd I have some quibbles with the very large and very small scales:

  –The size of the observable universe is not actually 14 billion light years: due to the expansion of space, it’s actually quite a bit larger than this, and the 93 billion light year number given for the size of the *whole* universe is actually the best current estimate for the diameter of the entire observable universe (not the radius, which is more like 46 billion light years). See wikipedia’s “observable universe” article, especially the second two paragraphs of the intro and the “misconceptions” section, along with the Scientific American article Misconceptions About the Big Bang, especially the paragraph on p. 4 of the pdf that says: “What does mark the edge of observable space? Here again there has been confusion. If space were not expanding, the most distant object we could see would now be about 14 billion light-years away from us, the distance light could have traveled in the 14 billion years since the big bang. But because the universe is expanding, the space traversed by a photon expands behind it during the voyage. Consequently, the current distance to the most distant object we can see is about three times farther, or 46 billion light-years.”

  –my other nitpick is that the animation gives sizes for particles like quarks, neutrinos, and electrons which are actually believed to be fundamental particles in current theories, which means they are either point particles of zero size or are strings in string theory whose size should be at the Planck scale (also, the animation include preons as the constituents of quarks, but most current models say preons don’t exist, see the wikipedia article on preons). Maybe the sizes they give are supposed to be the “cross sections” for these particles, the radii at which they are likely to scatter with other particles they pass (see here and here), but if so they’d need to specify the energy since the size of the cross-section depends on the energy, see here. And if that’s what they’re doing it seems like the choices of energy are kind of idiosyncratic, for example the most commonly-used figure for an electron’s cross-section is given here as 6.65 * 10^-29 meters^2, so a circle with that area would have a diameter of about 9*10^-15 meters (closest to 10^-14), whereas they give the size of the “electron core” as 10^-18 meters, 10,000 times smaller than that.

• [erratic]

  Hey man, is that a piece of fairy cake? My stomach’s just completely out to lunch.

• [Anonymous]

  “if life is going to exist in a Universe of this size, then the one thing it cannot have is a sense of proportion”

• [Anonymous]

  Interesting, but it was made a lot more visually striking by the Eames brothers in IBM’s ‘Power of Ten’ video, which was appropriated for the Gas track ‘Microscopic’ (which just makes it even better IMHO.)

  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dvTe1-a6Pdo

• [Anonymous]

  Admit it, Virgos kick arse!

• [Anonymous]

  One difficulty with continuous or 10x zooms is they can be hard to remember.
  “Err, was the Earth 10^6 m or 10^7 m ???”
  Breaking scale up into 1000x chunks can make it easier to remember and learn.
  “The Earth a blue marble, so it’s about 10 somethings. Not m, not km, ok, so about 10 Mm.”

  How Big Are Things? http://www.vendian.org/howbig/

  (disclaimer: I wrote it;)

• [Sparrow]

  Erratic wins the thread, and demonstrates a total lack of perspective.

• [Anonymous]

  the interesting thing is the tiny range that includes us and everything we will ever experience..

• [bazzargh]

  I have to admit, I am in rapturuous awe that bubble cars are simultaneously “4m” and “(10^0 x 3)m” long.

  On the scale of nits picked, this is 10^-4 m across, at the limit of human perception.

• [dagfooyo]

  Amazing! Thanks so much Maggie and whoever submitterated this, it made my evening.

  My personal WTF moments:

  The Moon’s diameter is less than the width of the US!

  The planck length is almost unimaginably small. I wonder what if anything exists in that huge amount of space between that scale and the scale of subatomic particles.

  And finally:
  There are 7 Meter Long earthworms?!?!

• [CastanhasDoPara]

  Yeah, not trying to be a dick here but this was cool when I suggested this to be posted back in February. Here’s the link I suggested. Thanks for posting this anyway as it is still pretty neat.

  http://primaxstudio.com/stuff/scale_of_universe/

• [Anonymous]

  This may be the author’s original link, which is better than the suggested hosted spamalot link.

  http://htwins.net/scale/

  Thank you for posting!

• [EMJ]

  CELL SIZE AND SCALE

  http://learn.genetics.utah.edu/content/begin/cells/scale/

  • [Antinous / Moderator]

    That’s brilliant.

• [Super Nate]

  So the universe is about 10^62 Plank lengths across. A sphere(?) of about 2/3 pi x 10^186 cubic Plank lengths. It’s about 5×10^61 Plank times old. So if we figure that as a sphere-based hyper cone…

  5/6 pi x 10^245 cubic Plank length*times

  should gives us a decent resolution for the history of the universe, so far…

  If we use the year 10^500 at the heat death of the universe

  1/6 pi x 10^686

  should cover pretty much all of history for ever and ever. Did I make any glaring errors here?