"And if you feel that you can't go on  And your will's sinkin' low  Just believe, and you can't go wrong  In the light, you will find the road" — Led Zeppelin I work out of our office on One Market Street in San Francisco. My standup-desk is right across from our Gallery at One Market. One of our newer exhibits is called Powers of Design. It was first featured at the Technology Entertainment & Design (TED) conference last year. Powers of Design depicts the size of everything from the inconceivably small to the mind-blowingly large. I thought I'd cover the exhibit elements, one at a time, over the next few months. I started small and am working my way up. 1010 MAGNITUDE 10,000,000,000 m 10 Million Kilometers Distance Light Travels in 34 Seconds 10 Million Kilometers In the time it takes you to read this (about half a minute), light will have traveled around 10 million kilometers. Makes you sound like a really slow reader. The speed of light in a vacuum (c in E=mc2) is 299,792,458 meters per second. While light seems to move instantaneously, its speed is noticeable when dealing with huge distances. It can take anywhere from minutes to hours for messages to get from Earth to a distant spacecraft or vice versa. The light we see from stars today left them years ago (in some cases thousands of years or more), allowing us to study the universe’s history by looking at distant objects. "The night is clear  When the stars appear  I recite their names  The farthest lights  Only now arrive  Wonder how they've changed?  The stars appeared  But they're always there  Up above the day  The farthest lights  Take us back in time  Wonder how they've changed?" — Freedy Johnson "Light, light, light. In the light. Everybody needs the light." — Led Zeppelin Thanks to Global Content Manager, Matt Tierney, for the images and text that comprise the exhibit element. This is just one of the many exhibits in the gallery at One Market in San Francisco. The gallery is open to the public on Wednesdays from 12 pm to 5 pm, and admission is free. Visit us. Previous posts on this topic include: 10-15 Protons and Neutrons 10-14 Atomic Nucleus of a Uranium Atom 10-13 Nada, Zilch, Zero, Zip 10-12 Gamma Rays 10-11 Fluorine Ion 10-10 Wavelength of Hard X-Rays 10-9 Carbon Nanotubes 10-8 Molecular Transport Nano Robot 10-7 HIV Virus 10-6 Red Blood Cells 10-5 Sand 10-4 Microelectromechanical Systems 10-3 Sonata Silicium Watch Components 10-2 Lego 10-1 Prosthetic Fairing 100 Biome Concept Car 101 Ma'erkang Housing Reconstruction 102 Shanghai Tower 103 Bay Bridge 104 Masdar City 105 Palm Islands 106 The Moon 107 Earth 108 Jupiter 109 The Sun Future blog posts will cover: 1011 Distance from Jupiter to the Sun 1012 Distance from Pluto to the Sun 1013 Voyager 2 1014 The Solar System 1015 Cat's Eye Nebula 1016 Pillars of Creation 1017 Great Orion Nebula 1018 M15 Globular Cluster 1019 Sagitarius Dwarf Galaxy 1020 Trangulum Galaxy 1021 The Milky Way 1022 IC 1101 1023 Local Group of Galaxies 1024 The Local Supercluster 1025 3C 273 1026 Outer Limit of the Universe Measurement is alive in the lab. Go to the original post...