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 logarithimic 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 expoential manner.

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
0– 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, Bronze Age, Iron Age	Ice age ends, Cities, Writing, Wheel, Civilization, Religions, Philosophy, more..
10k– 100k	Pleistocene ends, Paleolithic, Neolithic	Agriculture, Cave paintings, Art, Dance, Tally stick, Ice age, Neandertal extinction
100k– 1M	Pleistocene	150K Human, Fire, Language?, Ice age, Spirituality
1M– 10M	Pliocene, Stone Age	~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

See also

• Timeline of the Universe
• Geologic timescale
• Timeline of evolution
• Orders of magnitude (time)
• Logarithmic timeline of current events
• Detailed Exponential Timeline

External links

• Interivew with Heinz von Foerster (http://www.stanford.edu/group/SHR/4-2/text/interviewvonf.html)

ru:Логарифмическая шкала времени