“The deepest photo ever taken” and the history of scientific discovery

An 84-hour exposure on the Hubble conducted by the wonderful Space Telescope Science Institute is shown here.

And what’s beyond the edge of the Big Bang? Coming within 5 years?

The history of science over the centuries can be written in terms of improvements in resolution. From the beginning and all the way up to 1609, when Galileo’s telescope first assisted human vision, scientific knowledge consisted of making descriptions and comparisons for events taking place at measurement scales accessible to the human eye, from about 10 to the -3 (a tiny speck) and up to 10 to + 7 meters (the Milky Way), some 11 orders of magnitude. Now, 400 years later, scientific descriptions and comparisons take place at scales from 10 to the -18 and up to 10 to the +25 meters, some 44 orders of magnitude. That is, from 1609 to 2003, scientific resolution improved an average of about 8 orders of magnitude per century (or 100 million-fold per century).

Our data displays should do as well.