Understanding scale is vital, he adds, because “we live in an extremely interconnected world,” one in which “things that are big and things that are small impact us.”įor example, “if your car has the wrong gas, that’s only a molecular formation, yet your car won’t go anywhere. “A lot of people are like that when it comes to scale.” Think, he says, of that famous New Yorker cover with Manhattan as the center of the universe. When Demetrios talks of the Powers of Ten, his enthusiasm is so contagious that at least for a fleeting moment it all seems crystal-clear. “We thought of having 100,000,” he said, “but the thought of being responsible for eating them was too horrible to contemplate.” He’d enlisted son Xander, 12, to count the M&Ms, although he was not ready to swear that the big bowl held precisely 10,000. At the gallery, he’d set out five bowls of M&Ms to illustrate the idea of exponential growth-the first holding one candy, the second 10, then 100, 1,000 and 10,000 candies. Perhaps the simplest explanation of Powers of Ten is to be found on the Web site, in a quote attributed to a philosopher in ancient China: “You cannot discuss the ocean with a well frog.”īut the engaging Demetrios also finds ways to make the concept comprehensible for the math-impaired. To her, the Eameses are “sort of icons,” although she thinks “you have to be a mathematician, rather than an artist, to get it.” She wanted to bone up on the film before showing it to her seventh- and eighth-grade art students as a jumping-off point for creating an animated flip book. Those dropping by the gallery included Lynn Leatart, a teacher at Crossroads Middle School in Santa Monica. He chose an environmental theme to point out that environmental problems are problems of scale-population explosion, decimation of the rain forest at the rate of two acres per second, the thousands of years of half-life of plutonium.Ĭonversely, he adds, one person taking positive action can multiply his or her good works by many powers of 10 through education and communication. The film was shown in Tokyo and in Lisbon, at a library in Nassawadox, Va., and at P.S. Zafran, who admires the Eameses for their “new way of seeing things,” says his project is all about “interconnectedness.”ĭemetrios’ grand plan for the day was a worldwide forum, focusing on the environment, to promote Powers of Ten thinking. He’s asking recipients of the Eames earth to send back dirt from their corners of the globe for him to scatter near the Eames House. Zafran, who’s sending Eames dirt to friends as far away as Vietnam and Bangladesh, is titillated by the prospect of “customs agents scratching their noodles.” Her hope? That it “would get people thinking about the strength of numbers-and the big picture.” Swaim, who’s seen the film “many, many times,” e-mailed 10 friends around the globe, asking each to also pick up 10 pieces of trash on Tuesday. For weeks, enthusiasts had been logging onto to post their plans. But Powers of Ten Day was essentially a cyberspace event. The film played continuously on Tuesday at the gallery, where a trickle of visitors stopped by.

Eames power of ten