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The human experience is trapped within seconds and years, millimetres & km. But science explores way beyond, stretching towards infinity, where our limited imaginations have no reference. London’s greatest vantage points reveal the beauty and serenity of the unimaginably big.
IMAGINE the SOLAR SYSTEM scaled down 1:300 million times
… to the SIZE OF LONDON:
The SUN at the centre, is ONE POD of the London Eye
500m away – the Earth is a golf ball by Big Ben
2.5km away – Jupiter is a beach in The Shard
10km away – Uranus is a melon in Greenwich
15km away – Pluto is a pea at Heathrow Airport
500m away – the Earth is a golf ball by Big Ben
2.5km away – Jupiter is a beach in The Shard
10km away – Uranus is a melon in Greenwich
15km away – Pluto is a pea at Heathrow Airport
Standing on the terrace of Somerset House with a strawberry that is
Mars
in hand
¾ km to the right is the
Sun
, a single pod of the London Eye. 1 km to the left is
Jupiter
, a beachball in the Shard.
This model reveals the scale of space:
* Whilst Mars is reduced to the size of a strawberry, the next planet out is still a whole km away, too small to make out by the naked eye;
* The Sun is just 4m across, but its gravity pulls objects way past London's furthest suburbs;
* The planets orbits advance by just millimeters each minute, so the gravity has time to effect.
* Light, travelling at walking pace, takes 8 minutes to reach the Earth.
The world is a tiny rock floating in a very, very big space.
The speed of light
Light travels at a billion km/h, but our scale tames it nicely to a slow walking pace, below 4 km/h. The Earth is 500m away from the London Eye. A gentle stroll to Waterloo bridge takes 8 minutes, the same time that it takes light to reach the earth from the Sun
Gravity
The earth rips through space 100x faster than a rifle bullet.
But on this scale, it moves 100 times slower than a snail, advancing just 36cm per hour. As it moves, the feeble pull of gravity bends it 0.1mm towards the London Eye. That is just enough to bend its path from a straight line into a circle from which the earth will never escape.