A Matter of Scale
Way Big vs. Way Small

I ponder size. The variations of it. The relativity of it, the magnitude, the multitude of it. The infinity of it.

On a cloudless night, away from the city and other light polluters, I lean my head back and see a universe that, for all practical purposes, is infinite. Asking questions about its size spawns some very hard-to-fathom or digest answers:

By latest estimate, it takes light 92 billion years to travel from one end of the universe to the other. Ninety-two billion years.

A very large place, in other words, housing trillions (that’s a number sporting 12 zeros) of galaxies out there and there are trillions of stars in each galaxy. I’m not even sure that we humans are equipped to grasp the magnitude of this, I for one am not.

Really, who can envision a trillion, a trillion trillion?

And then, when I thought I was done not grasping the enormity of the universe, I read this account of a recent Hubble Telescope investigation.

It was called the Hubble Deep Fields project—where the engineers focused the space telescope on a stamp-sized jet-black (as in galaxy- and star-less) plot of night sky for a hundred or so hours—to now discover, in this tiny light-less spot among the stars, another three thousand galaxies. Let me say this again (with feeling this time—to quote Arlo Guthrie): another three thousand galaxies. Multiply these three thousand with the number of stamp-sized patches of night sky up there, and they add up to quite a few, and that would be the extrapolated number of the as-yet-to-be-discovered galaxies out there.

Way to go Hubble.

And then, more recently, a new Radio Survey goes ahead and finds 300,000 additional galaxies out there—keep in mind, the word is galaxies, each with a trillion or so stars, i.e., suns. Well, a pittance really, this new discovery, cosmically speaking, but there seems to be no end to them—galaxies and their stars.

Yes, it does seem that whenever we think we’ve seen as far as can be seen, our technology improves and we see farther and farther, with no end in sight (pun intended).

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Even while I’m waving my white “I-give-up” flag, I must ask, donning a sort of Devi’s Advocate hat: what about the galaxies whose light has yet to reach us—and might not for billions of years—surely, there must be trillions of those as well, in every little part of the sky. And how many beyond those? For is there any way of estimating how much light has yet to arrive, since none of it has, as yet?

I think not.

I don’t know what number might be close enough to infinity to actually rub shoulders with it, but I think that would be the number of stars in our universe. Still, I don’t think this number is infinite because there is no such thing as an infinite number—i.e., nothing material can be infinite.

Another way to put this: I believe the number of stars is finite because something created (and with a beginning, like our universe) can neither be eternal nor infinite, of that I’m sure, but it can be near enough eternal and infinite to suggest otherwise.

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Then, when I turn my gaze inward for a gander inside my body, I find something similar: the number of cells and microbes and bacteria basketed by my skin also borders on the infinite: trillions and trillions of the little things.

And then, were I to with an even better, yet-to-be-invented microscope take a closer look at the molecular, I’m definitely ready to give up, especially after reading Schrödinger’s “What Is Life?” where he illustrates the size of water molecules like this:

If you fill a glass with water and then, by some magical means, mark each water molecule—say, paint it orange—and then pour this glass of orange water molecules into the ocean somewhere and then, by some other magical means, mix the oceans so well that your glass of water is evenly dispersed throughout the seven seas, all the way down to the 10,000 meters depths; if you did this and now used your original (now empty) glass and filled it with ocean water from anywhere in the world, at any depth, you would scoop up at least a few hundred of your original (orange) water molecules.

To me, this is beyond comprehension. That’s immeasurably small. Literally.

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Once I have picked myself up from the floor and taken a few deep breaths and counted to ten several times I try to gain some perspective on this and after some musing do realize that infinitely large and infinitely small is a matter of scale.

The Universe is infinitely large just because I only stand a fathom or so tall. Were I, say, the size of a solar system, the Universe would seem a little (though not much) less imposing. Were I, say, the size of the Milky Way, perhaps then I could at least get a handle on things size- and universe-wise. And if, well let’s just go all the way and say I can assume the size of the Universe, then: it’s not big at all, “just my size,” actually: nice fit.

The same, I see, would hold in the other direction. Were I to assume the size of a bacterium, then all other bacteria and all those cells would seem very normal size-wise, me-sized, and were I to assume the size of an electron, well, then the cell would be the size of the universe, just about—at least the size of a galaxy—and all these electrons just the right size to seem perfectly normal.

For some odd reason, it appears to me that the here-and-now size I’m stranded in sits almost perfectly balanced between the infinitely large and the infinitely small. To confound and intimidate? Who knows?

These days, I am trying to adopt a more flexible attitude toward size and to teach myself to assume whatever size best suits the occasion: universe-sized to survey the outer (and still expanding, they say) rims (skin, now); electron-sized to take a closer look at the atoms and the small, small houses that their even smaller populations and all their children live in.

And ultimately, when I ponder this all the way, I do not think that I, as a spirit, can be of permanently fixed size. I think I am the size I consider myself to be.

Right now, I consider me to be the size of my body, because I happen to inhabit one at the moment.

Perhaps in another life, I was a star or a galaxy.

I still have a way to go to improve my size-changing skill. But when I get there, then perhaps I’ll dream myself a different story.

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