Krank
11-12-2017, 11:19 AM
Really interesting article...
Excerpt:
This intangible boundary between the knowable and the unknowable is, at present, roughly a thousand, trillion, trillion meters across — should you possess the means to measure it.
At the other end, in the deepest innards of every single speck of cosmos, is a scale of a hundred billion, trillion, trillionths of a meter. It represents the last meaningful physical scale within our present understanding of physics, a place where space-time itself gets choppy, uncertain, and decidedly problematic.
These two extremes span a jaw-dropping 63 orders of magnitude. To be fair, though, this isn't an immutable constant of nature. Turn the clock back more than 13 billion years and you'd be able to find a moment when this number was merely 1. Over time, the expansion of the cosmos and the passage of light has unlocked all of those other scales, each one a new opportunity for novelty and complexity.
https://www.npr.org/sections/13.7/2017/11/12/562802511/the-answer-to-life-the-universe-and-everything-it-s-63?sc=tw
Excerpt:
This intangible boundary between the knowable and the unknowable is, at present, roughly a thousand, trillion, trillion meters across — should you possess the means to measure it.
At the other end, in the deepest innards of every single speck of cosmos, is a scale of a hundred billion, trillion, trillionths of a meter. It represents the last meaningful physical scale within our present understanding of physics, a place where space-time itself gets choppy, uncertain, and decidedly problematic.
These two extremes span a jaw-dropping 63 orders of magnitude. To be fair, though, this isn't an immutable constant of nature. Turn the clock back more than 13 billion years and you'd be able to find a moment when this number was merely 1. Over time, the expansion of the cosmos and the passage of light has unlocked all of those other scales, each one a new opportunity for novelty and complexity.
https://www.npr.org/sections/13.7/2017/11/12/562802511/the-answer-to-life-the-universe-and-everything-it-s-63?sc=tw