Both works depict the relative scale of the Universe according to an order of magnitude (or logarithmic scale) based on a factor of ten, first expanding out from the Earth until the entire universe is surveyed, then reducing inward until a single atom and its quarks are observed.

The Powers of Ten films were adaptations of the book Cosmic View (1957) by Dutch educator Kees Boeke.

The 1977 film has a number of changes from the prototype, including being entirely in color, moving the starting location from Miami to Chicago, removing the relativistic (time) dimension, introducing an additional two powers of ten at each extreme, a change in narrator from Judith Bronowski to Philip Morrison, and much-improved graphics.

The camera then zooms back in at a rate of a power of ten per 2 seconds to the picnic, and then slows back down to its original rate into the man's hand, to views of negative powers of ten: 10 centimeters (10−1 meters), and so forth, revealing a white blood cell and zooming in on it—until the camera comes to quarks in a proton of a carbon atom at 10−16 meters.

[6] In 1998, Powers of Ten, the 1977 version, was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant".