The Scale of the Universe: From Quantum Strings and Quarks to the Observable Cosmos
Everything in life is relative, yet the human brain struggles to picture sizes separated by dozens of orders of magnitude. While our everyday intuition spans from a millimeter to a few kilometers, reality stretches vastly further in both directions – from subatomic particles to hypergiant stars next to which our Sun looks like a speck of dust.
Screenshot from the Russian edition of The Scale of the Universe showing an oak tree, lunar module, house, and blue whale
That is why interactive scale visualizers hit so hard: in just a couple of minutes of scrolling from atoms to galaxy clusters, you feel genuine awe and cannot help reflecting on our place in the cosmos. The old 2013 Flash embed no longer runs in modern browsers, so the creators ported the tool to HTML5 – and below you will find the working interactive link along with the classic video journeys across all known scales.
1. The Micro-Universe: From Planck Length to Living Cells
To display the full range of physical reality on a single screen, physicists and simulation authors rely on a logarithmic scale based on powers of ten. Every step multiplies or divides size by ten, turning an impossible linear distance into a smooth journey you can explore in seconds.
- Planck length (10-35 m): the theoretical lower limit of length in modern physics, where classical notions of space and time break down into quantum foam.
- Quarks and protons (10-18 to 10-15 m): the fundamental building blocks of ordinary matter locked inside every atomic nucleus.
- Atoms and DNA (10-10 to 10-9 m): hydrogen and carbon atoms building molecular chains roughly two nanometers wide that store genetic code.
- Viruses and cells (10-7 to 10-5 m): from bacteriophages to red blood cells and amoebas visible only under optical or electron microscopes.
2. The Scale of the Universe 2 Interactive Project
In 2012, twin brothers Cary and Michael Huang released The Scale of the Universe 2, an interactive web experience that quickly became an internet classic. Using your mouse wheel or the bottom slider, you can glide smoothly across 62 orders of magnitude – from quantum strings and neutrinos to galaxy filaments – and click any object for exact measurements and notes.
Although the original release required Adobe Flash Player, the brothers later rebuilt it using modern HTML5 and JavaScript. You can explore the interactive app directly in any modern browser at htwins.net/scale2, or watch the original full-scale video walkthrough from co-creator Cary Huang below:
3. The Macro-Cosmos: Hypergiant Stars and the Observable Universe
Once you scroll past everyday meters and kilometers, the scale accelerates dramatically. Earth (~12,742 km across) looks tiny beside Jupiter, and Jupiter itself is dwarfed roughly a thousand times in volume by our Sun.
- Red hypergiants: stars like VY Canis Majoris and Stephenson 2-18 have radii well over a thousand times that of the Sun – placed at the center of our Solar System, Stephenson 2-18 would engulf Saturn’s orbit.
- Light-years and galaxies: sunlight reaches Earth in about 8 minutes, whereas crossing the Milky Way disk (~100,000 light-years) takes light a thousand centuries.
- Cosmic web: thousands of galaxies gather into massive superclusters like Laniakea and glowing filaments separated by vast cosmic voids.
- Observable cosmos: accounting for the expansion of space over 13.8 billion years, the observable universe spans roughly 93 billion light-years in diameter (around 8.8 × 1026 meters).
4. The 1977 Classic: Powers of Ten by Charles and Ray Eames
Modern 3D astronomy apps owe a huge debt to the landmark nine-minute short film Powers of Ten (1977) by Charles and Ray Eames, inspired by Kees Boeke’s 1957 book Cosmic View. Starting from a lakeside picnic in Chicago, the camera zooms outward by a factor of ten every ten seconds to the edge of the known cosmos, then plunges back into a human hand down to the nucleus of a carbon atom.
Even in the era of the James Webb Space Telescope and high-resolution cosmological simulations, zooming from quarks to distant superclusters never loses its magic. Five minutes with a scale comparison puts everyday worries into a remarkably calm perspective.