Simple Complexity

Nikon - Universcale

Today I am writing about a really cool visualization project. It is Universcale at the Nikon site. I find the interface extremely effective at showing the scale of really large and really small things while at the same time showing that size is based on perspective. What is large from one perspective is small from another.

From the microworld to the universe, you will be able to compare and understand things which cannot be physically compared by setting them up against a scale.

The scale starts at the light year. The Universe is 13.7 billion light years. It takes a lot of scrolling and scaling (use your mouse wheel to speed up the movement) to get to the next smaller object, the local group of galaxies which is a mere 6 million light years. The visualization really helps you see how small these huge galaxies are next to the universe. Scroll for a lot longer and you end up at the milky way, comparatively tiny at only 100 thousand light years wide.

After a lot of scrolling you are informed that you have moved into the kilometer scale. We encounter our solar system at 12 billion kilometers. The tiny sun is only 1.39 million kilometers. We start to encounter objects in the solar system, the largest, Jupiter, at 143 thousand kilometers. Earth at 13 thousand kilometers, and the moon at 3.5 thousand kilometers.

Leaving “space”, you scroll for a long time to find the highest object on earth, Mount Everest, at an elevation of almost 9 kilometers. As huge as that mountain is, by now the visualization gives you the sense of how small this huge thing is.

You begin to enter the scale of the meter. The Empire State Building is 381 meters. The Statue of Liberty is 93 meters. A tyrannosaurus is 15 meters. Most elephant are 4 meters. A person is about 1.7 meters.

The visualization moves to the realm of the centimeter with objects like the massive soccer ball (22 cm) to a bee at 1.3 cm. At the milimeter scale, the 8 mm ladybug is huge compared to the 1 mm snow flake. You scale down to the micrometer size with objects like a red blood cell and mitrochondrea. Even smaller is the nanometer, with objects like a silicon crystal and DNA. Even smaller is a picometer, in which a hydrogen atom is huge. You scale past a region we can currently measure.

There is something highly artistic about this visualization. I found it extremely thought provoking, and an excellent example of a method to compare and contrast the size of objects.

Do yourself a favor and visit the project yourself here. You will not regret it.

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