12 Visualizations That Will Change the Way You View Scale in Your World

By DREW SKAU - VISUAL.LY
Added: Fri, 10 Feb 2012 04:19:00 UTC

Scale is a simple concept. From a very early age, children know about big and small, heavy and light, more and less. Extreme scales, however, are another story.

Try to imagine, for example, the size of the universe… or $1 trillion made up entirely of dollar bills. Exactly. Grasping the actual quantities involved in extreme scales can be difficult, which makes managing scale in visualizations an interesting problem.

Below are 12 visualizations that try to show things at extreme scales.

1. The classic visualization describing change of scale is the Powers of Ten video by Charles and Ray Eames.

2. A newer version of a very similar visualization is The Scale of the Universe by Cary and Michael Huang. This version has an interactive slider and lets you scroll through the zoom levels yourself.

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