Logarithmic timeline

From Academic Kids

A logarithmic timeline, based on logarithmic scale, was developed by Heinz von Foerster, the philosopher and physicist. He was attempting to create a table of historical data, and realised that the closer to the present he got the more events he could put in the table. He therefore developed the logarithmic timeline in order to shrink the information in such a way that the same density of information was preserved, whilst at the same time allowing him to accurately show the whole span of history. An example of a table based on these principles is shown below. Von Foerster later used the table as one of the starting points of his argument that memory also declines in an exponential manner.

[edit]

Example of a logarithmic timeline

In this table each row is defined in years ago, that is, years before the present date, with the most recent at the top of the chart. Each event is an occurrence of an observed or inferred process.

Years Ago	Period	Event, Invention or Historical development
1– 10	1995–present: 1990s, 2000s	WWW, Biotechnology, Nanotechnology, Global warming, more..
10– 100	1900–1995: 20th century	Car to spacecraft, Nuclear power, Antibiotics, Electronics, Totalitarianism, World wars, Nuclear war, more...
100– 1k	1000–1900, Middle Ages	Renaissance, Printing press, Industrial Revolution, Firearms, more...
1k– 10k	Start of Holocene, 8000 BC–AD 1000, Neolithic, Bronze Age, Iron Age	Cities, Empires, Writing, Wheel, Civilization, Religions, Philosophy, �tzi the Iceman, more..
10k– 100k	Pleistocene ends, Paleolithic ends, Mesolithic, beginning of Neolithic	Ice age, Music, Art, Cave paintings, Dance, Tally stick, Medicine, Neandertal extinction, Ice age ends, Domestication - Agriculture and Animal husbandry
100k– 1M	Pleistocene, Paleolithic	150K Human, Fire, Language?, Ice age, Spirituality
1M– 10M	Pliocene, Paleolithic begins, Lower Paleolithic	~2M Evolution of Homo sapiens, Hunting - Gathering, Tools
10M– 100M	~Tertiary	Grasses, Mammals, Cretaceous-Tertiary extinction event
100M– 1B	Paleozoic, Mesozoic	Cambrian explosion of life, Animals, Flowering plants, Permian-Triassic extinction event
1B– 14B	Precambrian, Cosmology	Big Bang, Stars and galaxies, Life, Earth