Day 68
People are commonly asked what superpower they'd like to have, if they could choose just one. I'd choose to have super magnifying eyes. I'd love few things more in this world than to be able to look at something, and dive into it at down to the same level as an electron microscope. I bet it would be fascinating to absolutely no end.
Understanding what goes on at the microscopic level could give one a useful perspective on one's own way of living. Such a superpower would give one very detailed knowledge of, for example, the beautiful complexity that goes into every object on the planet, especially living things. It also would be a total nightmare for germophobes!
Size, I suppose, is also relative to distance, if we're to speak from the senses, and unscientifically. I remember many times as a child camping in the interior, or down the Washington/Oregon coast, carefully aiming my flashlight toward a star and flicking it on. Any one of these occasions could be, oh, say at least 10 years past now, meaning my beams of light have made their way about 95,000,000,000,000 kilometres so far.
Of course the most prevalent quality of the universe, aside from its vastness, is its near-emptiness. Relative to its size (whatever that even is) there really isn't much 'stuff' at all. Hell, if the sun was the size of a softball, Earth would be a grain of sand, and it would be 50 feet away. The picture books always give you sizes, but they never show you the distances, because no picture book could really hold the distances without making the planets microscopic!
If an atom of hydrogen were to be enlarged to occupy a cubic mile, the proton and neutron would be about the size of marbles, and the electron the size of a pea. The rest is empty space.
It is all very weird. The more I think about these numbers the more I feel I have in common with our ape ancestors in the trees.
Oh, and you know what else is really, really weird? Well, you already know, because I know pretty much who reads this blog!
Understanding what goes on at the microscopic level could give one a useful perspective on one's own way of living. Such a superpower would give one very detailed knowledge of, for example, the beautiful complexity that goes into every object on the planet, especially living things. It also would be a total nightmare for germophobes!
Size, I suppose, is also relative to distance, if we're to speak from the senses, and unscientifically. I remember many times as a child camping in the interior, or down the Washington/Oregon coast, carefully aiming my flashlight toward a star and flicking it on. Any one of these occasions could be, oh, say at least 10 years past now, meaning my beams of light have made their way about 95,000,000,000,000 kilometres so far.
Of course the most prevalent quality of the universe, aside from its vastness, is its near-emptiness. Relative to its size (whatever that even is) there really isn't much 'stuff' at all. Hell, if the sun was the size of a softball, Earth would be a grain of sand, and it would be 50 feet away. The picture books always give you sizes, but they never show you the distances, because no picture book could really hold the distances without making the planets microscopic!
If an atom of hydrogen were to be enlarged to occupy a cubic mile, the proton and neutron would be about the size of marbles, and the electron the size of a pea. The rest is empty space.
It is all very weird. The more I think about these numbers the more I feel I have in common with our ape ancestors in the trees.
Oh, and you know what else is really, really weird? Well, you already know, because I know pretty much who reads this blog!
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