Powers of Ten [A Blast from the Bast]

If you've not seen this little gem, you should. It's marvelous. Note that that the most interesting and complex visual action centers of human-scale phenomena, a bit larger, at bit smaller, but human scale. At large and small scales the phenomena of the cosmos appear much alike. I've appended a note about that. (Originally posted in June 2011)

Some years ago I was rummaging through stacks in a used-book store in Troy, New York, when I came upon Powers of Ten: About the Relative Size of Things in the Universe. I smiled from ear to ear and bought it. I’d heard about he film for years, but never seen it, and I don’t recall whether I’d even known there was a book. But here it was in my hands, a book called Powers of Ten and it clearly was based on the movie.

What, you ask, is this marvelous movie/book about?

It’s about the whole universe. Let the Wikipedia explain:

Powers of Ten is a 1968 American documentary short film written and directed by Ray Eames and her husband, Charles Eames, rereleased in 1977. The film depicts the relative scale of the Universe in factors of ten (see also logarithmic scale and order of magnitude). The film is an adaptation of the 1957 book Cosmic View by Kees Boeke, and more recently is the basis of a new book version. Both adaptations, film and book, follow the form of the Boeke original, adding color and photography to the black and white drawings employed by Boeke in his seminal work.

So, two days ago I googled “powers of ten”, figuring that I’d come up with an online version of the movie somewhere. Well, I did better than that. The Eames Office has a website about the project. The website includes the film, but also photos and illustrations (including the originals from the book) and a blog. Lots of stuff there. Have fun.

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This is a passage from William Benzon and David Hays, A Note on Why Natural Selection Leads to Complexity (Journal of Social and Biological Structures 13: 33-40, 1990):

Prigogine, who won the Nobel prize for demonstrating that order can arise by accident (Prigogine and Stengers 1984; Prigogine 1980; Nicolis and Prigogine 1977). He showed that when certain kinds of thermodynamic systems get far from equilibrium order can arise spontaneously. These systems include, but are not limited to, living systems. In general, so-called dissipative systems are such that small fluctuations can be amplified to the point where they change the behavior of the system. These systems have very large numbers of parts and the spontaneous order they exhibit arises on the macroscopic temporal and spatial scales of the whole system rather than on the microscopic temporal and spatial scales of its very many component parts. Further, since these processes are irreversible, it follows that time is not simply an empty vessel in which things just happen. The passage of time, rather, is intrinsic to physical process.

We live in a world in which “evolutionary processes leading to diversification and increasing complexity” are intrinsic to the inanimate as well as the animate world (Nicolis and Prigogine 1977: 1; see also Prigogine and Stengers 1984: 297-298). That this complexity is a complexity inherent in the fabric of the universe is indicated in a passage where Prigogine (1980: xv) asserts “that living systems are far-from-equilibrium objects separated by instabilities from the world of equilibrium and that living organisms are necessarily ‘large,’ macroscopic objects requiring a coherent state of matter in order to produce the complex biomolecules that make the perpetuation of life possible.” Here Prigogine asserts that organisms are macroscopic objects, implicitly contrasting them with microscopic objects.

Prigogine has noted that the twentieth century introduction of physical constants such as the speed of light and Planck's constant has given an absolute magnitude to physical events (Prigogine and Stengers 1984: 217-218). If the world were entirely Newtonian, then a velocity of 400,000 meters per second would be essentially the same as a velocity of 200,000 meters per second. That is not the universe in which we live. Similarly, a Newtonian atom would be a miniature solar system; but a real atom is quite different from a miniature solar system.

Physical scale makes a difference. The physical laws which apply at the atomic scale, and smaller, are not the same as those which apply to relatively large objects. That the pattern of physical law should change with scale, that is a complexity inherent in the fabric of the universe, that is a complexity which does not exist in a Newtonian universe. At the molecular level life is subject to the quantum mechanical laws of the micro-universe. But multi-celled organisms are large enough that, considered as homogeneous physical bodies, they exist in the macroscopic world of Newtonian mechanics. Life thus straddles a complexity which inheres in the very structure of the universe.

You can download the full article: Academia.edu, https://www.academia.edu/8488872/A_Note_on_Why_Natural_Selection_Leads_to_Complexity; SSRN, https://ssrn.com/abstract=1591788.