The big lie
01/10/2007 . Source: Mark R. Leeper 
I am watching The Universe on the History Channel. At first I thought it was a really good program. I am finding the program more and more frustrating. It is clear the scientists who do the talking know the truth and are just refusing to mention it. Everybody is hung up on our egocentric ways of thinking we have had from ancient times. And though astronomers and cosmologists know the truth they choose not to tell us. You have to figure the truth out for yourself. Then if you dare you can tell other people, but even then something inside them will tell them it is you who are wrong. What do they tell you? They say the solar system is really big. You have to go a long way to get to the outer planets. Wrong. The nearest star is tremendously far away. Nope. We are on the outer part of a huge spiral arm. Twaddle! And the arm is just part of an unfathomably gigundo galaxy. And it is just one of many galaxies that are huge. They are not. And this cluster of galaxies is enormously tremendously big. No it's not. And light is just reaching the Earth from long, long, long ago. Again, no.
Big. Big! BIG! Long. Long! LONG! Huge. Huge! HUGE!
Well it is time you knew the truth as only I seem to be willing to tell it to you. The clusters and the galaxies are not huge. They are not even big. They are tiny. Even compared to things that are minute, it is tiny. It is nano-miniscule. There is a whole lot more out there than this cluster of galaxies. And it does not take a whole long time to get to the other stars. They are so close we are just about right there already. And you get there in a flash. The only problem is that we are so amazingly tiny and we live such a short, short, short time (in universe terms) that their nearness doesn't do us any good.
Our thinking has been presumptuous and wrong-headed for a long time. Protagoras (480 to 410 B.C.) said, "Man is the measure of all things." And what an egotistical, anthropocentric viewpoint that is. Well, I suppose that is how we measure things. Most of our units of measurement come from human body parts (the inch, the foot, the cubit) or water (centigrade) or the size of our planet (the meter) or a combination (the gram). The English system which measured distances by body parts (the foot) is slowly being replaced by the only slightly more rational metric system where length is compared to the size of our planet and centigrade temperatures compare temperatures to the freezing and boiling points of water. These are all very arbitrary and very anthropocentric.
We may think the natural way to measure speed is in kilometres (or worse miles) per hour. That is we divide a certain convenient fraction of the circumference of our planet (or multiple of our foot size) divided by a certain convenient fraction of the time it takes our planet to revolve once on its axis. Those units may be meaningful on Earth but they become pointless someplace not on our planet like the moon or Mars.
Earth is just not important in the universe but that is the way we like to measure the universe. I you wanted to make your formulae to come out nicely you use the universe's choice of unit of speed, C, the speed of light. Look at the Lorentz Transform. You see a lot of (V/C)s. That says measure your speed *your* way, but then divide by the speed of light, also measured *your* way. If you just said that your velocity was some fraction of the speed of light you would just use V. Everything would be much nicer. But who wants to see signs on the highway that say "SPEED LIMIT (8.21E-8)*C"? We are just not ready to accept the natural units of the universe.
We think that C is a really big and inconvenient unit and hard to deal with. The same thing happens in mathematics. We measure angles in degrees. 360 is a nice easy number to deal with because it has a lot of divisors. But that is not the natural unit the universe chooses for angle measure. Once you get into calculus you realize that degree measure would make all the formulae impossibly complex. The natural unit of measure of an angle is the radian, comparing the radius of a circle to a fraction of the circumference.
If you let man be the measure of all things it really distorts your view of the universe. Our distances are way too small, and our lives are way too short. We have to get past the idea "man is the measure of all things." Any logical view of the universe says that something unimaginable happened just short time ago--a few billion years-- and out of it spewed a bit of matter. And when some of the matter cooled there were denser parts that we think of as mega-clusters of galaxies. And if you get of close and look really carefully you will see those mega-clusters are made of smaller clusters. Those clusters are made of little individual galaxies, maybe only 2,000,000 light years apart.
They look almost solid but if you look really closely you can see the galaxies have an anatomy. Some a pill-shaped and some spin like pinwheels and have little tiny arms. They are almost too small to see and you have to really look. If you look agonizingly closely at one of those arms you might see tiny, itsy-bitsy individual stars. Now this is going to take some imagination but some, of these little tiny stars, each almost too small to consider, have bits of cold matter circling them.
And some of these unimaginably small bits of matter actually have life on them. Well, it is a sort of life. It is not clear that a little spark that is just there for such an unimaginable short instant of time can be called life. If you would pick one of these tiny life forms up with little tiny tweezers and tried to look at it by the light of even a neighbouring star, it would be dead well before you got it close enough to look at it in the light. They just don't live very long.
But these little points of life look at the universe in that fraction of an instant they are alive and, of course, to them it looks unimaginably big. But then they are really, really infinitesimal for the size of their egos and they don't have much imagination.
Want to feel good about yourself again? Just imagine that something so tiny, so short-lived, made up of such little pieces as us beat the odds and became intelligent enough to contemplate things like the integers and the size of the universe. What are the chances of *that* happening?
Mark R. Leeper
© Mark R. Leeper 2007 |
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