Many of you have probably already seen this visualization given its popularity in the blogosphere. Still, it bears repeating given its fundamental coolness. It's an interactive visualization, found here, that demonstrates the relative sizes of many things in the universe. What's interesting is its scale - it ranges from the absolutely microscopic (i.e. the proposed length of "strings" in string theory) to the very largest (the estimated size of the entire universe).
It accomplishes this with a simple slider. Moving one direction takes you "smaller" while the other direction goes "larger". At each step, particular objects from ants to people to mountains to planets are shown relative to one another to give a sense of scale. They are also labeled in SI units to give a formal grounding to their relative sizes. Very cool IMO.
Thats amazing, its pretty hard to fathom the immense scale of the universe but this visualization does a great job of it.
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