Tuesday, November 15, 2011

Powers of Ten

This classic film shows the power of "adding a zero." It starts off looking at a one meter square picnic scene near the shore of Lake Michigan. The camera pulls back to reveal 10 square meters, than 100, then 1000 then 10,000 etc... until the viewer is at the edge of the known universe many millions of light-years away from Earth. Then the viewer gets pulled back into the picnic scene... finally into the man's skin, into a blood vessel and eventually into a carbon atom in the man's DNA.

You can watch the film at this link.

This movie is introducing our basic chemistry unit. In order for us to understand the universe and the living things in it (Bio, after all, means life) we must understand the matter of which they're made. Since all living things are made up of atoms and molecules we need to understand how these basic building blocks of matter interact.

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