
Powers of Ten
A picnic beside Lake Michigan in Chicago is the fixed point for this Eames Office film, narrated by Phil Morrison, which reframes scale itself as the subject. Every ten seconds the frame widens to a view ten times larger, starting at one meter across a sleeping man's hand and pulling back past the city, the planet, the solar system, until the Milky Way is one dim speck among countless others at the edge of the observable universe. The camera then reverses, diving back to the picnic and continuing inward past skin, cells, and a strand of DNA, ending inside a proton within a carbon atom in a white blood cell. Made in 1977 by Charles and Ray Eames, the film has no plot and almost no incident beyond this single continuous zoom, but each ten-second jump is captioned with its exact magnitude, turning an abstract idea, the sheer range between galactic and subatomic scale, into something you watch happen in real time.