Cosmic zoom video
This video starts out with a view of the milky way from 100 million light years away, and zooms in by a power of 10 until all you see is quarks. Well, sort of see quarks. Things that small don’t actualy have colors, and I’m not sure they really have shapes either. But I’m not someone to ask about such things, I mostly just look at pictures. And these are kind of nice pictures.
This isn’t a new idea, the cosmic zoom has been done before, several times. But if you haven’t seen one, you should definitely take a look. Gives a bit of perspective. Unfortunately, exponential perspective kind of squashes the subject matter - going from a view where a galaxy is tiny to one where a sub-atomic particle doesn’t fit on the screen in a couple of minutes makes the range feel smaller than it really is. Most people feel in a linear, not exponential, way. But you can’t really do a cosmic zoom on a linear basis.
From looking at science, lots of things seem to be exponential. I wonder if that is because most things are exponential, or because exponential things attract attention.
What Exponential means
An exponential function is one where the next value is a multiple of the current one. For example, a savings account that you don’t mess with is exponential - how much is in it next year is how much is in it now times some number, probably around 1.02 (the 1 is the money that is in there now, the .02 is 2% interest). And the year after, it will grow a little faster, because a slightly larger number will be multiplied by 1.02. This example is not as much fun as it used to be, because interest rates on savings accounts suck now. But if you carry it foreward a bunch of years, you see it building up steam.
