In astronomy there is an extraordinary unity between the very large and very small. It's symbolized by this object called Ouroboros, the snake that eats its tail. The Ouroboros emerged from different civilizations thousands of years ago, it's one of those universal cultural symbols. This form of the Ouroboros was invented by Shelly Glashow, Nobel Prize winning physicist. To symbolize the unity between the microscopic world of subatomic particles and the entirety of the universe, or cosmology. We are spanning 45 orders of magnitude in scale here. From the quarks at the center of every atomic nucleus to the entire observable universe. And the human form, or biological entities, happen to sit in the middle of this extraordinary logarithmic range. What's the meaning of the Ouroboros? The Ouroboros tells us that perhaps to understand the fundamental nature of matter on the microscopic scale, we have to investigate the universe as a whole. We'll see that what it's really telling us is that the study of the early universe and the big bang is perhaps a key to understanding the structure of matter. Going in the other direction, we'll see that using accelerators like the Large Hadron Collider serve to recreate conditions that only existed in the first tiny fractions of a second after the big bang. It's an exciting unification of two disparate fields, high-energy physics and cosmology. It's an extraordinary fact that we are made of tiny subatomic particles far too small to see with the eye. And are part of a universe far too large to see except with the largest telescope, and yet can keep both of these concepts within our heads. In this video you'll watch a zoom in orders of magnitude where each two seconds we decrease order of magnitude and scale. Starting with the size of the observable universe, where every dot is an individual galaxy or system of hundreds of billions of stars and ending up deep within an atomic nucleus of a carbon atom. And the hand of a young girl in this scene. This is a modern version of the famous Powers of Ten video made by the Eames brothers in the 1970s. It's been updated several times. This particular version from Cosmic Voyage was originally shown as an IMAX movie. [NOISE] [MUSIC] >> [LAUGH] [MUSIC] >> There's an extraordinary unity between physics and astrophysics. Where to understand the entire universe, we need to understand the tiny, subatomic particles from which all matter in the universe is made. It goes in the other direction, too. To understand the microscopic nature of matter, we may have to diagnose it through an understanding of the Big Bang.
