 |
| Image by permission Peter Ruette, project manager of Scale of the Universe |
Scale of the Universe, a wonderful, interactive demo, showing the scale of things from the infinitesimally small to astronomically large. Best viewed on a laptop/desktop so you can use the scroll wheel on a mouse to zoom in or out.
For those unfamiliar with exponentiation and scientific notation used in the demo:
The number 10 can be represented as 10¹ or "10 to the power of one"
10 x 10 = 100 as 10² or "ten to the power of two"
10 x 10 x 10 = 1000 as 10³
and so on
For numbers less than 1:
1/10 or 1 tenth is represented as 10⁻¹
1/100 as 10⁻²
1/1000 as 10⁻³
and so on
1 is 10⁰
In
scientific notation a number such as 2456 would be expressed as 2.456 x
10³ (I.e. 2.456 x 1000), often with just one significant figure to the left
of the decimal point. Sometimes more than one figure is used,
especially if the number is a measurement expressed in base units. So 25
mm would be expressed as 25 x 10⁻³ m because the metre is the SI unit
of length (25 x 10⁻³ = 25 x 1/1000 or 0.025 m)