The Vastness So Small

The Vastness So Small

    There is something about the enormity of the universe that continues to fascinate me.  Why this is I have no idea; perhaps as a child stares at the size of a support pillar while standing underneath a bridge I am amazed that anything could be so large.  And so, I read about our world "out there," not enough to dive into a full-on college astronomy course or to watch hour after hour of films about the birth of our universe, but just enough to keep me wondering.  So you wouldn't expect a theoretical physicist such as Christophe Galfard* to capture my attention, much less write an international bestseller (how often do you see books make the international list, much less one dealing with physics).  And he does this with imagination, telling you from the start that you will have only one equation in the entire book and that it's one you already know...Einstein's E=mc2.  Here's his introduction: The ambition, my ambition, is that in this book I will not leave any readers behind...You are about to start a journey through the universe as it is understood by science today.  It is my deepest belief that we can all understand this stuff.  And from that point onward, he asks only one thing of you which is to use your imagination to travel, not as a human but as a conglomeration of atoms, the lifeblood of the universe.

    Take his words about our sun: If mankind could, one way or another, harvest all the energy the Sun radiates in one second, it would be enough to sustain the entire world's energy-needs for about half a billion years...As you fly closer and closer to that star of ours, however,  you realize that the Sun is not as big as when you saw it 5 billion years in the future, as it reached its end.  Still, it is big.  To put things into perspective, if the Sun were the volume of a large watermelon, the tiny Earth would lie some 140 feet away -- and you'd need a magnifying glass to see it.  So wait, a couple of big things in those few sentences...the death of our sun (estimated by measuring the amount of measurable hydrogen and helium still coalescing inside its core), the sun being a star and not a planet, and the medium-size of the sun itself (relative of course, to our tiny planet). 

    So he goes further, explaining that the core at the center of our earth where all of this happens (at 4,000 miles) is too small to generate the heat needed to keep something as large as the sun alive (whose core is located 310,000 miles in).  Inside the sun's core are the two smallest atoms known, hydrogen and helium, and the temperatures there are now so hot that the outer shell of the hydrogen atoms have been stripped away and are fusing together (fusion) to make nuclear energy...and as those fused atoms leave, they reunite with their stripped shells of electrons, turning into nitrogen, silver, gold, oxygen and carbon.  In other words...us.  Without any of this happening, our world, our mass of living matter, wouldn't and couldn't exist.  But wait, just as our planet and was hit by something quite large (possibly something the size of Mars) and had some 25% of our surface knocked off into a cloud of dust in space which over time revolved and gravitated into what is now our moon, so physicists now believe that our sun is little more than something that has similarly evolved over time, perhaps being a 2nd or 3rd generation star that has also coalesced from dusty matter (to clarify the distinctions between a "star" and a "planet," a star is generally so large that its core has to create this sort of thermonuclear inside whereas a "planet" is generally smaller with a core of metal --the earth's is thought to consist of iron or nickle-- surrounded by gas).

    Now maybe this is all so fascinating to me because I think about our puny size a lot...how can we humans, tiny as we are, really be that different or that meaningful in the scheme of things?  After all, dinosaurs had already lived 200 times longer than we have and where did it get them?  An afterlife?  A vision of distant relatives that passed before them?  Or was it too much to think about, to cast their thoughts only on eating the next fern or avoiding the next predator?  But then 200 million years (we've only been here as humans for 100 thousand years) is a long time to evolve and to create thought.  How do we know something didn't come up in all those years?...and whatever happened to that missing chuck of our planet?  Did it begin our planet's rotation?  And why didn't the moon similarly evolve with life having so many of the same elements from our earth (of course, all of this moon stuff happened long before life began to form on our planet).

    Maudlin?  Perhaps.  And these thoughts are coming out more and more in me as my mother nears her 91st birthday, and in talking with my friend, our mothers appear to have taken such similar paths as they aged (his mother passed away at 91).  Perhaps it is another friend having his closest friend pass away, or another friend witnessing the final weeks or months of his closest dog.  What happens afterwards, if anything?  It's an interesting lesson of life, one that nobody knows the answer to, but one that all of us will soon find out.  So for me, the birth of our solar system, our universe, proves comforting, that life could not be possible without death...that even when our sun reaches its end in another 5 billion years, it will explode to create more life, an event that is happening throughout our universe (perhaps throughout other universes, say today's physicists) even if we can't see it or solve it.  A hundred-thousand years ago, a primitive animal or reptile couldn't have seen us humans arriving in such numbers...much as an alien of the future might well say about us ("...they only lived for a short period and likely their primitive minds couldn't have envisioned this form of life.").

    So, while I look outward it forces me in many ways to look inward.  Looking in a mirror, what do you see?  It is a physical being, is it a life, is it a life well-lived?  Look long enough and you can also use your imagination to travel, into your own core and into your own fusion of emotions and memories and hopes and regrets.  But perhaps as with all those re-binding electrons, all of those fused parts of you have now reformed and are bursting out to create something new, perhaps even new life...and perhaps even new life for yourself.


*Worth peeking at, Christophe Galfard's book is titled "The Universe in Your Hand."