Cosmic View: The Universe in 40 Jumps
Charles and Ray Eames were thinking about scale and using the system of exponential powers to visualize and understand large quantities long before their magnum opus of 1977, Powers of Ten: A Film Dealing with the Relative Size of Things in the Universe, and the Effect of Adding Another Zero (the title says it all: the magic lies in it’s brilliant demonstration of one example). Their films A Communications Primer, 1953 (based on Claude Shannon’s The Mathematical Theory of Communication, 1949), and 2n from 1961, are examples of this kind of thinking. Kees Boeke’s book Cosmic View: The Universe in 40 Jumps,1957, provided a framework for the explorations of scale seen in Powers of Ten: A Rough Sketch for a Proposed Film Dealing with the Powers of Ten and The Relative Size of the Universe, 1968, and Powers of Ten…, 1977.