R&D LAB Data Visualisation Study Craft study, no business claim
Cosmos-Scale
Sixty-two orders of magnitude in one continuous zoom, from the Planck length to the diameter of the observable universe.
- 62orders of magnitude
- 138objects with dossiers
- 18 471galaxies plotted
- 12bands, one axis
One frame from the ladder: 62 thousand light-years across, inside the Milky Way. The strip along the bottom is the entire range of the app, and it is also the control.
Why this is published
Published as a craft study and labelled as one. It carries no business claim. What it does prove is that we can hold a dataset spanning sixty-two orders of magnitude in one continuous, navigable view without it degenerating into a slideshow, which is the problem every serious scientific or industrial visualisation runs into.
A list of very big and very small things is not interesting. The ladder between them is. A human being sits almost exactly halfway between the smallest length physics allows and the largest thing light has had time to show us, and almost everything in between is stranger than it looks from either end.
One axis, not a sequence of slides
The hard part is not drawing an atom or a galaxy. It is keeping them on the same axis while the numbers span ten to the sixty-second, where ordinary floating-point geometry gives up long before either end.
Everything is placed on a logarithmic ladder and rebuilt around wherever you currently are, so travel is continuous. The spectrum along the bottom is the whole range at once, and it doubles as the navigation control.
Every object earns its place
Each of the 138 objects carries a dossier: what it is, how big it is, and something that is only interesting if it is true. The line reading "if this were a doorway, a red blood cell would be 4.4 micrometres across" is computed from the current field of view, not written in advance.
The cosmic map is a separate mode: a wedge of sky out to the edge of what can ever be seen, with 18,471 galaxies and 2,600 quasars coloured by redshift, on real cosmology.
Climb it
Six rungs, forty-six orders of magnitude apart
Quarks195 yoctometres. Below this the app stops asserting and starts marking open questions, which is the honest edge of the dataset.
A proton4.74 attometres. Ordinary floating-point geometry has already given up here; the logarithmic ladder has not.
A cell5.02 micrometres. Twelve orders of magnitude up, and it is still continuous travel rather than a cut.
A human2.22 centimetres, inside a human body. The only rung anyone has intuition for, and it sits almost exactly halfway.
The Solar System0.546 astronomical units. The context line above the stage always names what you are currently inside.
The universe928 million light-years. Forty-six orders of magnitude above the first rung, on one unbroken axis.
Why it holds together
One log-scale engine, four surfaces
The engine is the product. Once position, size and camera all live on a logarithmic ladder, the dossier, the size chart, the spectrum and the map are four readings of one state rather than four features to keep in sync.
Every band on the ladder
Under the hood
Where it fits
- Scientific and industrial data spanning more orders of magnitude than one chart can hold.
- Museum, exhibition and education work where a visitor has to feel a range rather than read it.
- Any interface where zoom is the primary navigation and the usual answer is discrete tabs.
How this was made
The application and this article were produced by AI. No person has read through the underlying data in full.
Checked
- Licensing of every bundled image: 102 bitmap textures, the planetary and solar ones by Solar System Scope (CC BY 4.0, derived from NASA data), plus 83 photographs from NASA, ESA/Hubble, ESO, JWST/STScI, NOAA, CSIRO and NIAID. All credited on the page and in the image register.
- The figures quoted describe the application itself and are checkable against it: 62 orders of magnitude, 138 objects with dossiers, 18,471 galaxies, 12 spectrum bands.
- The full zoom was driven end to end during capture, all twelve band buttons by real mouse click, so the frames show states the application actually reaches.
- The page states on its own face that it is a craft study carrying no business claim.
Not checked
- The astronomical figures in the individual object dossiers have not been checked against a reference by a person. They are not intended to be cited.
- The placement of objects along the scale ladder has not been independently verified.
- The claim that a human sits almost exactly halfway between the Planck length and the observable universe is a well-known popular framing and was not recomputed here.
Image credits: every frame on this page is a screenshot of the Cosmos-Scale application (iiterate Technologies GmbH). The planetary and solar textures shown in it are by Solar System Scope (CC BY 4.0, derived from NASA data); the deep-sky, micrograph and landscape photography is by NASA (public domain), ESA/Hubble, ESO and JWST/STScI (CC BY 4.0), and by NOAA, CSIRO and NIAID.
“The eternal silence of these infinite spaces frightens me.”
Why this is published
What this means for your project
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