Powers of Ten

"The movie zooms through 40 powers of 10, starting from the picnickers, then pans back to the largest scales of the known universe, and finally reverses direction in a dizzying descent down to the sub-nuclear scale of quarks. The genius of the movie is that as time ticks by linearly, like 1, 2, 3, 4, the field of view contracts or expands exponentially, changing tenfold at each step from 10 meters to 100 to 1,000 to 10,000. In effect, the counting takes place in the exponent — 101, 102, 103, 104 — and not in the number itself."