The telescope and the microscope both appeared in the 17th century, beginning a revolution in seeing that has reached out to the edge of the universe and, down to the atom. Until then, human experience with objects was limited to what the eye could perceive, which is just a tiny fraction of the universe that we can now observe.
A couple of years ago some clever young brothers, Cary and Michael Huang, did an animation of the scale of the universe, from the smallest conceptualized thing - the Planck length, to the diameter of the observable universe, which is approximately 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 times bigger. To view the Huang's animation, go here.
It's interesting to me that our own size, and the scales we find most meaningful in daily life - the inch, foot, mile, etc, lie very near the middle of this huge range of scale. In other words, as immense as the universe is compared to us - we have seen objects as far as the distance light can travel since the beginning of the universe about 14 billion years ago - which is a long way, since light can travel about 176,000 miles in a second - we are that immense compared to a single neutrino.
The mind-boggling size span of things in our universe leads to fascinating trivia. It has been estimated that the length of DNA in a single human cell - if it was all unraveled and laid out, would be about 2 meters. That alone is hard to grasp since you need a powerful microscope to even see the DNA. But then think how much DNA is in your body. There are approximately 100,000,000,000,000 cells in a human body, so all the DNA in your body, end to end, would stretch about 200,000,000,000,000 meters. How far is that?
Well, the average distance from the sun to Pluto is 3.67 billion miles. The DNA in a single human would stretch 124 billion miles, or just under 17 round trips from the sun to Pluto. It took Voyager 20 years to travel from Earth as far as Pluto. Does your head hurt yet?
I just hope my DNA doesn't spontaneously unravel -- it could tie the whole solar system up in knots.
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