The infinite and the infinitesimal. It's not often that a front page news story touches upon both concepts.
But on St. Patrick's Day, newspapers across the country carried the news that gravitational waves (or particles, or gravitons, or, as the New York Times accurately described them, "ripples in the fabric of space-time") from the first instant of creation had been detected.
I'll leave the precise nature of the observations, and their implications for physicists, to the news accounts. (The New York Times story, at least, was unusually well-done, as news stories on abstruse scientific topics go.)
But what caught my immediate attention was our growing need not only to conceptualize, but increasingly to measure, the Very Big and the Very Small.
The Very Small first: Physicists are now concerned with events as they developed during the first one trillionth of one trillionth of one trillionth of a second following the Big Bang. That's one over a denominator containing a "one" followed by 36 zeros. Or, in scientific notation that's 10 to the minus 36th (10-36) of a second.
A second is a short period of time. Movies are shot at 24 frames per second -- that's so fast that the eye can't detect individual frames. Good cameras have shutter speeds of a thousandth (1/1000 or 10-3) of a second. A period of time of ten to the minus 36th second is impossible for the human mind to grasp. One millionth (10-6) of a second is impossible for me to grasp!
So that boggles our minds. Then, there is the Very Big:
When we talk about space travel, we're usually still talking about visiting other planets of our own sun. But our sun is a smallish star near the edge of the Milky Way galaxy. The Milky Way is a small galaxy of about four billion stars. We know there are other galaxies in our universe, ranging in size from ten million stars to 100 trillion stars each. How many other galaxies? There are an estimated 170 billion galaxies in the "observable universe" -- i.e., galaxies not so far away that their light has not yet reached us.
So that's our universe, and that's Very Big. But that's the kind of Very Big we've known about for years.
The models being used to predict and explain the most recent observations suggest that the Big Bang was not the beginning of Cosmic Reality -- just of the Reality of our own Universe.
Walk along an ocean beach some day and watch the waves churning in. See how the foam consists of uncountable bubbles forming and then blowing away or popping?
Theoretical physicists suggest that that the Big Bang might be analogized to a bubble forming and rapidly expanding in the froth of an ocean.
Most of the hundred or so models resulting from Dr. Guth’s original vision suggest that inflation, once started, is eternal. Even as our own universe settled down to a comfortable homey expansion, the rest of the cosmos will continue blowing up, spinning off other bubbles endlessly, a concept known as the multiverse.
The evolution of our universe from the instant of the Big Bang until it one day perhaps dissipates into eternal coldness and blackness may -- in the Great Scheme of Things -- seem as significant as one, tiny, evanescent bubble you observed during your ocean walk. A bubble that may have seemed important to itself, but not to you, and certainly not to the limitless ocean from which it emerged.
Billions of galaxies, each containing billions of stars. Just a single bubble. >Pop!<
Planets, stars, galaxies, universes ... and the Great Unknowable Ocean of Ultimate Realty. Seconds, millionths of a second. Billionths of a second. Trillionths of a second. A single second divided into 1036 parts.
Whether you look at the Very Big or the Very Small -- approaching the infinite or the infinitesimal -- the exercise places in a different perspective the questions we spend our lives worrying about. Like whether the Crimea should belong to Russia or to Ukraine. Too bad we can't sit back at times and quietly mull over the relative importance of such matters, on our small planet of a smallish star in a small galaxy in a universe that's really just a tiny bubble of foam -- a bubble in which we play an infinitesimal role. Don't you think?
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