Somewhere between Fibonacci’s invention of arithmetic, which changed the world of numbers as we know it, and scientists’ ambitious visualizations of the scale of the universe lies a daunting fundamental question: How do we actually use these numbers to measure the universe? That’s precisely what the Royal Observatory Greenwich answers in this wonderful short animation, a teaser for a new exhibition titled Measuring the Universe: from the transit of Venus to the edge of the cosmos.

In a nod to this morning’s affirmation of the additive nature of scientific discovery, narrator Dr. Olivia Johnson observes:

What’s most incredible to me is how all these measurements build on each other. It’s only by knowing the scale of our Solar System — the distance between the Earth and Sun — that we’re able to measure the distances to nearby stars using parallax.

The charming animation was done by Robert Milne, Ross Phillips, and Kwok Fung Lam.

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