Powers of Ten (1977): The Eames Film Explained

VideoCharles & Ray EamesScale  ·  Cosmology  ·  Design  ·  1977

Apicnic. Two people in a park on the shore of Lake Michigan, in Chicago; the meal is over, fruit and books left on the blanket. The man lies back and falls asleep. The camera is exactly one meter above him, framing a one-meter square: an overhead portrait of an ordinary afternoon nap. Then the narrator begins, and the rule is announced: every ten seconds, we’ll view the starting point from ten times farther out.

Ten meters. A hundred meters. A kilometer. The park, the city, the lake, the continent, the planet, the orbit, the Solar System, the Milky Way. Roughly five minutes later we’re a hundred million light-years from that picnic blanket — at 1024meters — and galaxies hang on the screen like specks of dust. Then the film retraces the same path, this time far faster, skipping through the magnitudes in seconds; it doesn’t stop at the blanket and enters the skin on the sleeping man’s hand. The pace drops back to ten seconds. Skin, cell, nucleus, DNA, carbon atom, atomic nucleus, and finally the inside of a single proton: 10−16 meters. Twenty-four powers outward, sixteen inward; forty orders of magnitude between the two ends. That’s the whole film. Nine minutes, a single uninterrupted idea.

01A film by people who designed chairs

Most people know the Eames name from furniture; the molded plywood chairs, the leather lounge chair, textbook pages of twentieth-century design. The less familiar side is this: for decades, Charles and Ray Eames’s Los Angeles office also made films, and Powers of Ten is by far the best known of that filmography. Even the film’s full title gives away how the office worked: A Film Dealing with the Relative Size of Things in the Universe and the Effect of Adding Another Zero. The effect of adding a zero to a number. The title reads like a technical spec, not a poem; so does the film itself. The narration is by MIT physicist Philip Morrison, the music by Elmer Bernstein. Morrison never raises his voice; he walks from one end of the universe to the other with the composure of a man reading off numbers.

The 1977 film was actually the second attempt. The Eameses had rendered the same idea a decade earlier as a black-and-white, more modest draft: _A Rough Sketch..._In that version, clocks ran in the corner of the screen, comparing the accelerating traveler’s time with Earth time. In 1977 the Eameses removed these relativistic gauges, added two more powers of ten to each end of the journey, and left behind a plain exponent counter. That is one definition of good design: knowing what to take out.

Even the choice of Chicago is arithmetic, not aesthetics: the shore of Lake Michigan was picked so that the rising view approaches the disk of the Milky Way at roughly a right angle; you see the galaxy head-on rather than edge-on. The picnic blanket’s address isn’t a scenery choice, it’s the solution to a geometry problem. The nice twist is that the Chicago picnic wasn’t even shot in Chicago; the blanket was laid out in front of the Eames office in Venice, California. From the edge of a parking lot to the edge of the universe; that’s cinema for you.

Powers of Ten — Eames Office, 1977

02Whose idea it was: Kees Boeke

The idea didn’t belong to the Eameses, and they never hid it. The source is Dutch educator Kees Boeke’s 1957 book: Cosmic View: The Universe in 40 Jumps. The book opens with a photograph of a girl sitting outside her school with a cat in her lap; on each page the scale grows tenfold, and after reaching the known edge of the universe, it descends inward along the same staircase, ending inside the nucleus of a sodium atom. Forty jumps; the forty in the film’s skeleton comes from here. The lovely part is that this idea was born not in a laboratory but as a classroom project at Boeke’s school. What began as drawings meant to show children their place in the universe turned into a form that would occupy cinema for half a century.

The Eameses took this skeleton, turned the page-turning motion into a continuous camera move, and added the fixed ten-second pace. That pace is the film’s real invention. You can linger between the book’s pages as long as you like; the film won’t let you linger. As the scale grows, the camera’s speed multiplies along with it, and at a certain point the vehicle passes the speed of light without a second thought. The film doesn’t hide this, because it isn’t a journey, it’s a calculation.

“Boeke writes that he realized descending inward would open a world as full of marvels as the most boundless reaches of space outside.”

Cosmic View, Introduction — Kees Boeke

03Take the forty steps yourself

The slider below follows the film’s route: from inside a proton at 10−16 meters to the galactic dust at 1024 meters. Zero is the starting frame; one meter on the picnic blanket.

Scale Ladder  ·  10−16 → 1024

100

meters

Starting frame: the sleeping man on the blanket. One meter.

ProtonPicnicGalaxies

Each step is ten times the last. In the film, each step takes ten seconds.

Powers of Ten — Eames Office, 1977

04The film’s real lesson

The film’s subject looks like the universe, but its real subject is a way of thinking. On a linear scale the universe can’t be grasped: a film that tried to travel step by step from the picnic blanket to the nearest galaxies would take longer than a human lifetime. On a logarithmic scale, forty steps are enough. Making each step ten times the last turns the chasm between them into a staircase. What Powers of Ten does is take the logarithm off the blackboard as a formula and turn it into a motion you can watch. Textbooks have been explaining this for a hundred years; the Eameses showed it in nine minutes.

There’s also an observation the film quietly repeats: whichever way you go, density and emptiness alternate. Outward, from the crowding of the planets to interstellar void, to the light of the galaxy, to the intergalactic dark. Inward, the same pattern: from the crowding of the cell to the emptiness inside the atom, to the density of the nucleus. Matter clusters at every scale, and between the clusters there’s almost nothing. It’s one thing to read that as a sentence, another to see it forty steps in a row.

One more detail: even when the frame opens to a hundred million light-years, the point at dead center is still that sleeping man. The center never shifts. This is a framing choice, but also a quiet claim: any point in the universe can be chosen as the center, and every scale is reachable from that point by the same staircase. Even a man taking an afternoon nap will do.

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05Its legacy

The film was added to the U.S. Library of Congress’s National Film Registry; Philip Morrison and Phylis Morrison, meanwhile, published a book of the same name in 1982, laying out the film’s route page by page. But the real legacy isn’t in the lists, it’s in the imitations. Another film had grown from Boeke’s book too: the National Film Board of Canada’s wordless short Cosmic Zoom, drawn by Eva Szasz. Afterward this zoom became a fixture of popular culture: The Simpsons devoted an opening couch gag to the film, _Men in Black_parodied the same move by fitting the universe inside an alien’s marble in its finale, and Contact entrusted its opening to the same montage. Today, the cinematic ancestor of the pinch-to-zoom we do on a map app, pulling the planet closer and pushing it away with two fingers, is that camera hanging over the picnic blanket.

You can watch the film in nine minutes on the Eames Office’s official YouTube channel. My advice is to watch it twice: the first time for the image, the second while watching the exponent counter in the corner. On the second viewing the film changes; it stops being a space documentary and becomes a mathematics lesson. The lesson of a number with a zero added to its end.

Colophon

★★★★★

In short

Forty jumps, one continuous camera move, from inside a proton to a hundred million light-years. Nine minutes that make the exponent visible.

Powers of Ten ·  Dir. Charles & Ray Eames  ·  Eames Office for IBM, 1977  ·  abakcus.com