Powers of Ten

A tour of scale

An interactive lesson with 6 steps, about 5 minutes: you predict, drag and solve, with instant feedback on every answer. It runs in your browser and needs JavaScript.

What you’ll learn

• Each order of magnitude is a factor of 10; the universe spans about 41 of them.
• Logarithmic scales space numbers by multiplication: 1, 10, 100, … equally spaced.
• The log-scale midpoint is the geometric mean.

Steps

1. Zooming through the universe
2. Orders of magnitude
3. Log scale
4. From proton to universe
5. Seconds in a year
6. Middle of the universe?