So, just like
yesterday's post, click on this
this XKCD by Randall Munroe in order to make it bigger and more legible. It's very appropriate and kinda funny that for this one the explanation is up top and the cleverest little joke is at the bottom (which is opposite from yesterday's post), though there's plenty of funny in between. By the way, to understand that bottom-most joke, it might help to know about
Brian Greene (or, farther up the
scale,
Peter Norton, or, if you must,
Rick Astley)
Go to this actual webcomic, hover over the image, and there will be an additional message in the "title-text" . This one says:
The Planck length is another thousand or two pixels below the comic.
You could look up
"Planck length" on Wikipedia, but I think the link that I alluded to yesterday will do a better job explaining it (and might help clarify the Brian Greene joke too). The link goes to a website with the title
"The scale of the Universe" and it is mind-puddlingly grandiose in it's ambition and simplicity.
Munroe did this "Depth" drawing just a few days after he did his "Height" drawing
from yesterday. They do make for a wonderful matching set. That "Scale of the Universe" site, however, is the natural extension of both and is an incredibly engrossing diversion. There's two things about it that I want to point out as particularly fascinating:
First, there is a LOT more to explore on the smaller end of the
scale than on the larger end. Going all the way to the larger end of the scale there's known objects all the way up, without much in the way of gaps in orders of magnitude. But going to the small end, one goes through about 10 orders of magnitude where there is nothing known that can be mentioned/labeled. Now, granted, this is largely due to the fact that we at least know that those smaller orders of magnitude exist, even if we don't know what's there yet. By definition, there's nothing larger than The Universe at the larger end of the scale... unless there's multiverses and other devastatingly large things. They even
recently discovered evidence that there may in fact be other universes out there, which is literally impossible for the definition of "universe" to deal with, but that's simply a limitation of language. So the larger end of the scale could, in fact, go as far out as the smaller end of the scale goes, or maybe even infinitely farther, though I suspect that might not be true because the concept of "depth" or "distance" may have no meaning once one leave the boundaries of one universe... which, is, of course, impossible anyway. So it's kinda odd that the smaller end of the scale, where there is the "Planck's Length" limit as to how small things can get, is the end that's less explored... though I have less than no idea how it'd be even remotely possible to explore that far, what with
Heisenberg's uncertainty principal and the difficulty in manufacturing a small enough sensor.
The second thing that I noticed is probably grossly anthropocentric in the worst way, but I'll mention it anyway: It's amazing that humans are so close to the center of the entire scale. The very center of this scale seems to be around the millimeter range, which is still very much in the realm of standard human interaction. This second thing may, in fact, be merely a subset of the first thing... or it may just be a figment of the numbers and/or labels/language we've come up with to explain all of this. At the very least it suggests that humans have explored much more of the larger end of things than the smaller end of things. The bigger question, however, is whether this expansive scale is, in fact, centered around that millimeter range, (which would be an astoundingly bizarre coincidence) or if it this scale of things looks this way merely because we're the observers and thus it naturally centers around us and what we can observe. In other words, if we were several orders of magnitude larger or smaller, the scale would be centered/oriented differently. But how would beings that much larger or smaller than ourselves exist in such a way as to accomplish this kind of intellectual pursuit?
Since we're talking about so many impossible things anyway, might as well finish up with this bit from the second installment of that most wonderful trilogy-of-six-books:
The Restaurant at the End of the Universe:
The Restaurant at the End of the Universe is one of the most extraordinary ventures in the entire history of catering.
It is built on the fragmented remains of an eventually ruined planet which is (wioll haven be) enclosed in a vast time bubble and projected forward in time to the precise moment of the End of the Universe.
This is, many would say, impossible.
In it, guests take (willan on-take) their places at table and eat (willan on-eat) sumptuous meals whilst watching (willing watchen) the whole of creation explode around them.
This is, many would say, equally impossible.
You can arrive (mayan arivan on-when) for any sitting you like without prior (late fore-when) reservation because you can book retrospectively, as it were when you return to your own time. (you can have on-book haventa forewhen presooning returningwenta retrohome.)
This is, many would now insist, absolutely impossible.
At the Restaurant you can meet and dine with (mayan meetan con with dinan on when) a fascinating cross-section of the entire population of space and time.
This, it can be explained patiently, is also impossible.
You can visit it as many times as you like (mayan on-visit re-onvisiting ... and so on — for further tense-corrections consult Dr Streetmentioner's book) and be sure of never meeting yourself, because of the embarrassment this usually causes.
This, even if the rest were true, which it isn't, is patently impossible, say the doubters.
All you have to do is deposit one penny in a savings account in your own era, and when you arrive at the End of Time the operation of compound interest means that the fabulous cost of your meal has been paid for.
This, many claim, is not merely impossible but clearly insane, which is why the advertising executives of the star system of Bastablon came up with this slogan: "If you've done six impossible things this morning, why not round it off with breakfast at Milliways, the Restaurant at the End of the Universe?"
