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How the Infinitely Large Brought Me to the Infinitely Small
And my place right in between
When I was about eight years old, my family vacationed in a cabin in Wisconsin’s Northwoods, and, for the first time, I saw the black velvet sky filled to overflowing with bright streams of stars. Coming from a light-polluted city, the effect on my young psyche was breathtaking.
The pictures in our World Book Encyclopedia hadn’t prepared me for the vastness and beauty of this celestial display. Like many kids, that’s when I became fascinated with the universe.
Still, decades passed before the Hubble and James Webb telescopes revealed that we have trillions of galaxies, each with billions of stars.
I get lost when I think about the colossal size of the Cosmos. Infinity, or close to it, is too much for my Pooh brain, so my blog today is about the infinitesimally small.
A millimeter, one-tenth of a centimeter, is tiny, but subatomic particles need something much smaller with which to measure them. A “Planck length,” for example, is a unit of measurement in the Quantum world. It’s 10-³³ centimeters, a hundred billion times smaller than the diameter of a quark, which is a particle inside the nucleus of an atom that makes up protons and neutrons. The quark is a few hundred thousand times smaller than…
