The Magic of Reality

by Richard Dawkins

The Norse peoples of Scandinavia, famous as Viking seafarers, had lots of gods, as the Greeks and Romans did. The name of their chief god was Odin, sometimes called Wotan or Woden, from which we get our ‘Wednesday’. (‘Thursday’ comes from another Norse god, Thor, the god of thunder, which he made with his mighty hammer.)

There’s a lovely book called Earthsearch by John Cassidy, which makes an attempt to grasp it, using a scale model. Go out into a big field with a football and plonk it down to represent the sun. Then walk 25 metres away and drop a peppercorn to represent the Earth’s size and its distance from the sun. The moon, to the same scale, would be a pinhead, and it would be only 5 centimetres away from the peppercorn. But the nearest other star, Proxima Centauri, to the same scale, would be another (slightly smaller) football located about … wait for it … six and a half thousand kilometres away!