Secret Worlds: The Universe Within

T_G

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I went through my favourits tonight cleaning off some of the old stuff and broken links etc, and found this one. Haven't got a clue why I got this one, but it it is pretty amazing! (it needs Java)
[SIZE=-1]Secret Worlds: The Universe Within[/SIZE]

[SIZE=-1]View the Milky Way at 10 million light years from the Earth. Then move through space towards the Earth in successive orders of magnitude until you reach a tall oak tree just outside the buildings of the National High Magnetic Field Laboratory in Tallahassee, Florida. After that, begin to move from the actual size of a leaf into a microscopic world that reveals leaf cell walls, the cell nucleus, chromatin, DNA and finally, into the subatomic universe of electrons and protons.[/SIZE]


h**p://micro.magnet.fsu.edu/primer/java/scienceopticsu/powersof10/
 

tuggyman

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WOW. This puts it all in perspective of just how small and insignificant we are in the grand scale of the whole universe.
I'm going to hide under my rock!
 

spiney

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Size isn't that important, it's what you do that matters!
 

T_G

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tuggyman said:
WOW. This puts it all in perspective of just how small and insignificant we are in the grand scale of the whole universe.
I'm going to hide under my rock!

Damn why did I not think of it. Note to myself: *find yourself a rock to hide under*
 

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Seriously, size isn't important (that wasn't just innuendo!).

Since Galileo, the physical size of our known universe has steadily "expanded", from the sun and moon and 5 planets moving around the earth - not far away - until now when space has become unimaginably huge (maybe universe is also "closed" in space time terms, maybe not, but makes no real difference, it's still unbelievably big).

Does that really make life and love and thought and laughter - the things we do - any less significant?
 

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What's quite interesting is, how things change, as you go up or down through "powers of ten".

For instance, animal size is limited, both directions. Getting bigger, there's the famous relationship where volume increases as size cubed, but surface area only as size squared. So, elephants are the largest land animals, and have VERY thick legs! As you go smaller, this ratio means more heat loss, and animals need to have a faster metabolism, hence have shorter lives (rodents, birds, etc). The limits to smallness are set by single celled creatures, as life can't get any less complex!

www.iiap.res.in/outreach/appendix3.html .

After Rutherford came up with his "solar system model" of the atom, sci fi writers - before there was sci fi! - got busy, and did stories about entire universes inside atoms, a "solar systems inside solar systems" infinite regress, but unfortunately this is impossible, as things change a lot when the scale alters!

The universe used to be tiny! Roughly 100 years apart, Bruno then expanded it outwards (and got burned at the stake as a heretic), and later Hooke expanded it inwards.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giordano_Bruno .

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Micrographia .

(Note that Micrographia is full of amazing illustrations! if you Google for "micrographia" images you'll get quite a few. The entire book is downloadable free at Project Gutenberg, although I haven't tried that for myself!).
 
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