Zoom Into a Butterfly's Wing Illustration (Small)

Description

This illustration shows a butterfly's wing across ten orders of magnitude, from the butterfly to the atoms of which it is made.

Vast scale differences are usually shown through separate images (e.g., the Eames’ Powers of Ten). This illustration employs the artistic convention of perspective—typically used by landscape painters—to show multiple scales in one frame.

This image travels from the visible scale at top to the atomic scale in the foreground. Placing objects from the butterfly's wing in one frame clarifies connections between components, highlighting the system’s reliance on structures at very different scales.

This low resolution image (3.0 MB) is also available as a high resolution image and annotated poster in the NISE catalog.