Universcale: Get A Sense Of Perspective

Here's the perfect cure for that case of the Monday's you came down with this morning — Universcale. Universcale is a Flash-based web app I stumbled across this morning on Nikon's website.

Universcale attempts to put the universe in perspective using a proportional scale that ranges from the smallest particle to the largest units of measurement in space.

Here's a quote from the Nikon site:

We are able to view all entities, from the microworld to the universe, from a single perspective. By setting them up against a scale, we are able to compare and understand things which cannot be physically compared.

Today, using the electron microscope and astronomical telescope, we can see the objects which we have not been aware of its existence before. Are you able to fathom, or even roughly grasp, these sizes?

There's no Steven Hawking overdub, just some cheesy music, but the app is still a great way to burn some time.

Universcale starts with an extremely fast pan from the femtometer (which I had never heard of) out to the light year and then reverses direction and slowly zooms back in through galaxies, planets, mountains, people, insects and on down to the molecular level.

So if the productivity is slipping this afternoon anyway, why not just dive right in and give yourself a sense of your own scale in grand scheme of the universe, which, depending on which end of the spectrum you focus on, is either really really big or really really small.

Universcale requires Flash Player 6 or higher, JavaScript and a screen resolution of 1024x768 or higher.