HN Explorer

8 comments

[ 15.7 ms ] story [ 36.3 ms ] thread
msane
This is such a great demo. I saw this maybe a year ago and was just thinking about it the other day. Huge nebulas larger than the galaxy are completely mystifying.
amelius
And we are in the middle of this scale. I wonder if there is any significance to that.
cam_l
there's this stretch of road in western Queensland runs straight about 50 clicks. I drove through there once years ago just after a bushfire. horizon to horizon was dead flat. the land was the same color as the road. i remember driving past this single burnt out tree still standing. it was nowhere special.
amelius
that tree probably had some very special set of genes to be the last one surviving in that area
huxley
The significance is that the human is being used as the "measure of all things"

The scale is based on the ratio to the size of a human being (human being = 1 or 10^0), so if we were in the middle that would be why we'd be there, but the Planck Length is 10^-35 and "The Universe" is 10^27 so we aren't actually that close to the middle.

vorg
That's a 10^-8 difference in scale at the top end, though if we use the size of the human brain instead that's 10^-10 difference in scale. We're certain, however, about the Planck length being the smallest scale but not whether "The Observable Universe" is really the greatest distance. If some of the large scale parameters of physics, e.g. the fine structure constant, vary depending on position, then there could be a mathematical limit to the size of the Universe, which could conceivably be 10^10 times the "Observable Universe".