Big history at the Stone Age Institute

While I am on the subject of deep history, I should mention the Stone Age Institute’s project, From the Big Bang to the World Wide Web. Kathy Schick and Nicholas Toth at the Institute addressed the problem of presenting the vast time scale of Big History by using a powers-of-10 approach. They defined ten time periods, each one a factor of ten shorter than the one before it, and then selected the top ten evolutionary events within each time period. For example, the first period covers 10+ billion years ago to 1 billion years ago, the second covers 1 billion years ago to 100 million years ago, and so forth, until the 10th period covers the last 10 years. The quick walk through the time scales will make it all clear. Check out the rest of the project’s web site to explore the idea in greater depth. If you are in Bloomington, you can visit the accompanying exhibit at the Mathers Museum on the Indiana University campus (museum hours here).