I woke up this morning with a thought. A
thought that I’d never had before; this is despite the fact that I’ve often
read about, talked about and written about. The thought?
Well, the realization that the universe is
as small in scale as it is large. That is, there are objects in the universe
that are unimaginably small as there are objects that are unimaginably large.
Space programs since the 1960’s reaffirmed
the reality of the Earth in space, which is immediately understood to be a
tiny, fragile ball of life, "hanging in the void", shielded and
nourished by a paper-thin atmosphere. And we’ve read about the overview effect,
which is a cognitive shift in awareness reported by some astronauts and
cosmonauts during spaceflight, often while viewing the Earth from orbit or from
the lunar surface.
At the same time, some of us have an
inferiority complex about being smaller than average. Most people don’t like
being just average, but being less than average is even worse. Astronomers like
to take advantage, by pointing out that the universe is really, really big — much
bigger than these below-average-sized persons.
But we’re not so small if we compare ourselves
to small things. For instance, we are much, much bigger than a bacterium, which
is so small you need to look through a microscope to find it; and by the time
you do find it, it has probably split in half and turned into two even smaller
bacteria.
Now we often say the universe is a large,
large place. But we don’t seem to ever say the universe is a really small
place. If we take the height of an average person to be 1.7 x 100
meters, or roughly 1.7 meters, Gomez’s Hamburger is 1016 meters
away; the Milky Way galaxy 1021 meters and the observable universe
1026 meters.
Equally, a white blood cell is 10-5 big
(.0001) big, the Hepatitis B Virus is 10-8 meters and the smallest
object we know of include the Neutrino at 10-24 meters and more esoteric
objects such as strings, and the quantum foam coming in at 10-36
meters.
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