The universe

I should probably mention at this point that the universe is pretty big. Put it this way. Relative to electrons, buzzing around in atoms, grains of salt are enormous. I mean, they're unfathomably huge. An electron is about 5.7*10^-15 metres across (so that's 0.0000000000000057 metres), while a grain of salt is about half a millimetre across. That means that the grain of salt is almost 88 billion times the size of an electron.

88 BILLION TIMES?!?!?! WHAT DOES THAT EVEN MEAN?!

Well, let me explain. It's so much bigger that even if the electron were aware of its existence, fully appreciating the intricate sodium chloride lattice, which a key to understanding the nature of salt crystals, would be nigh on impossible. From our point of view, a salt crystal is only 1/340th our length, and even with our (relatively) high level of intelligence, we took ages to come close to understanding it. But we don't fully understand electrons.

Well, at least most physicists would agree. My thoughts today rested on this issue... if by being 15 orders of magnitude bigger than something we found it hard to understand it... shouldn't be the same when we're dealing with things bigger thant us? The Milky Way galaxy (our galaxy) is around 10^18 times out size... that's 1000000000000000000 times our size. Once again, unfathomably big. What this means is that any insights which we manage to glean about the galaxy as a whole are incredible. Maybe one day we'll know whether or not there's a big black hole in the centre. Who knows? But it's a testament to the work of countless astronomers, theoretical physicists and mathematicians that we know anything at all, let alone that we know it to the amount of detail that we do.

Long live science! :)