When we grow up we put away childish things. Listening to the cheery narrator describe how many million light-years we are away from Earth and seeing the buzzy artificial graphics of the carbon nucleus invariably provokes an unwanted wave of nostalgia for the progressive 1970s celebrations of human cultural and social difference mediated by the Children’s Television Workshop’s daily-dose reminder that “ the Earth’s a big blue marble when you see it from out there.” I expect that many readers of this forum will find the polished 1977 version familiar: its opening shot of picnickers in Chicago, its proto Google-Earth zoom above the Earth, its journey to the farthest reaches of outer space and then its dive into the blood cell of one of the picnickers, and finally into the subatomic realm of a carbon molecule.
It was at the National Air and Space Museum that I first viewed this nine-minute film, along with thousands and thousands of American Gen-Xers. It was on view from its opening day, July 4, 1976, until the end of 1979. the relative size of things in the universe,” that led to the installation of the Eameses’ 1968 version of Powers of Ten among the inaugural exhibits at the National Air and Space Museum in Washington, DC.
Powers of Ten is by far the most well-known of these, and explains exponential change or, as its subtitle puts it, “the effect of adding another zero.” It was presumably the power of the Eameses’ gifts in linking the aesthetic to the conceptual, and the film’s further promise of visualizing “. Powers of Ten is one of several short films created by the great midcentury designers Ray and Charles Eames to explore how innovations in film could be employed to explain fundamental scientific concepts such as symmetry and biofeedback.
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