Scale Helps Understand Reality

Imagine setting off on a spacecraft that can travel at the speed of light. You won’t get far. Even making it to the other side of the Milky Way would take 100,000 years. It is another 2.5 million years to Andromeda, our nearest galactic neighbor. And there are some 2 trillion galaxies beyond that.

The vastness of the cosmos defies comprehension. And yet, at the fundamental level, it is made of tiny particles.”It is a bit of a foreign country – both the small and the very big,” says particle physicist Alan Barr at the University of Oxford. “I don’t think you ever really understand it, you just get used to it.”

Still, you need to have some grasp of scale to have any chance of
appreciating how reality works.        READ MORE...