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| Universe |
Any universe simple enough to be understood is too simple to produce a mind able to understand it. Barrow’s Uncertainty Principle If you want to win bets against over over-confident teenagers then challenge them to fold a piece of A4 paper in half more than seven times. They’ll never do it. Doubling and halving are processes that go so much faster than we imagine. Let’s suppose that we take our sheet of A4 paper and slice it in half, again and again, using a laser beam so that we don’t get caught up with the problems of folding. After just 30 cuts we are down to 10-8 centimetres, close to the size of a single atom of hydrogen. Carry on halving and after 47 cuts we are down to 10-13 centimetres, the diameter of a single proton forming the nucleus of an atom of hydrogen. Keep on cutting and after 114 cuts we reach a remarkable size, about 10-33 of a centimetre, unimaginable in our anthropocentric metric units, but not so hard to imagine when we think of it as cutting the paper in half just 114 times, a lot to be sure, but far from unimaginable. What is so remarkable about this scale is that for physicists it marks the scale at which the very notions of space and time start to dissolve. We have no theories of physics, no descriptions of space, time and matter that are able to tell us what happens to that fragment of paper when it is cut in half just 114 times.
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| Galaxy |
It is likely that space as we know it ceases to exist and is replaced by some form of chaotic quantum ‘foam’, where gravity plays a new role in fashioning the forms of energy that can exist.4 It is the smallest length on which we can presently contemplate physical reality to ‘exist’. This tiny scale is the threshold that all the current contenders to be the new ‘theory of everything’ are pushing towards. Strings, M theory, non-commutative geometry, loop quantum gravity, twistors . . . all are seeking a new way of describing what really happens to our piece of paper when it is cut in half 114 times. What happens if we double the size of our sheet of A4 paper, going to A3, to A2 and so on? After just 90 doublings we have passed all the stars and the visible galaxies, and reached the edge of the entire visible Universe, 14 billion light years away. There are no doubt lots more universe farther away than this, but this is the greatest distance from which light has had time to reach us since the expansion of the Universe began 14 billion years ago. It is our cosmic horizon. Drawing together the large and the small, we have discovered that just 204 halvings and doublings of a piece of paper take us from the smallest to the largest dimensions of physical reality, from the quantum origins of space to the edge of the visible Universe.
Also Read:- The Wonders of Tautology.
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