Powers of Ten™ (1977)

Caption notes

The 1977 version of Charles and Ray Eames’s Powers of Ten starts at a lakeside picnic in Chicago and uses a regular beat to show tenfold changes in scale. The narration takes a one-meter-wide view outward past Earth and the Milky Way to the scale of galaxy clusters. The film speeds back to the starting point, then moves inward through a picnicker’s hand, past cells and DNA, to a proton in a carbon nucleus. Powers of ten give the two journeys a common scale, even as the absolute distances covered by individual steps vary greatly. This guide follows the narration and the production office’s account of the version. Individual frames, the final seconds and the film’s period scientific statements were not independently verified.