The Zoomable Universe Quotes

“We are accelerating and extending our minds through our computers and algorithms, through our medical prowess and our accumulated knowledge. These minds of ours are the most precious things; we need to cherish all seven-plus billion of them. Walking this rocky globe somewhere today may be a human who will take us to the next level of insight. This person could be anywhere-from Africa to Asia, Oceania to Europe, or in the Americas. This person could even be you. And that journey will be as extraordinary as this one.”
― Caleb Scharf, The Zoomable Universe: An Epic Tour Through Cosmic Scale, from Almost Everything to Nearly Nothing

“As a gas of normal matter pulls together-or, rather, falls together-it transforms gravitational potential energy into thermal energy. In other words, it heats up. That sets in motion a competition between gravity workimg to condense matter and thermal-energy pressure spreading matter apart. In the right circumstances, though, if the matter can cool off fast enough, gravity can pull it into very dense concentrations indeed.”
― Caleb Scharf, The Zoomable Universe: An Epic Tour Through Cosmic Scale, from Almost Everything to Nearly Nothing

“We've been around for the tiniest sliver of cosmic time, yet our science can already take us across sixty orders of magnitude in scale. To put that in perspective, if the age of the universe were a human lifetime, it would have taken the cosmos about five hours to attain its present understanding of itself in the form of us.”
― Caleb Scharf, The Zoomable Universe: An Epic Tour Through Cosmic Scale, from Almost Everything to Nearly Nothing

“There are underlying principles at play in nature, from the fields, quanta, and forces of the universe to the ebb and flow of complexity, emergence, and organization. Those principles form a language rich enough to transcend any separation in time or space-we just have to learn how to translate it all.”
― Caleb Scharf, The Zoomable Universe: An Epic Tour Through Cosmic Scale, from Almost Everything to Nearly Nothing

“In powers of ten, humans exist almost halfway between the inconceivably big and the unimaginably tiny, and the final plunge from 10^-19 meters to 10^-34 meters is as deep as the descent from the human scale to the interior of a proton.”
― Caleb Scharf, The Zoomable Universe: An Epic Tour Through Cosmic Scale, from Almost Everything to Nearly Nothing

“Our cosmic circumstances influence the way we see reality.”
― Caleb Scharf, The Zoomable Universe: An Epic Tour Through Cosmic Scale, from Almost Everything to Nearly Nothing

“The innards of that proton are far more messy and inelegant than we might have expected. Although this composite object is experienced by the outside world as if it simply contains two up quarks and one down quark, that is only part of the story. Look closer and we find that the structure of this composite particle is a stew of gluons and virtual quark and anti-quark pairs-popping in and out of existence within the allowances of the uncertainty principle. Energy and time are borrowed and balanced; stuff appears and disappears before the universal bookkeepers can get angry.”
― Caleb Scharf, The Zoomable Universe: An Epic Tour Through Cosmic Scale, from Almost Everything to Nearly Nothing

“Where carbon comes from in the universe is also a deep function of quantum physics. Like all the heavier elements, it us produced via nucleosynthesis (from nuclear fusion) in stars. But the high abundance of carbon (it comes in fourth in the count of atoms in today's universe, after hydrogen, helium, and oxygen) relies on several key properties of the cosmos. Most carbon forms through the triple-alpha process: the fusion of two helium nuclei into a beryllium-8 nucleus, followed by the fusion of the beryllium nucleus and another helium nucleus into carbon. This would be a horribly inefficient way to make carbon, except for some subtle coincidences. These coincidences are pretty technical, and may only be truly relished by nuclear physicists, but they're worth knowing about because they can help you grasp the connections between fundamental physics and us. The first coincidence is that in a star's interior, the combined energy of a beryllium-8 nucleus and a helium nucleus can closely match that of an energized carbon-12 atomic nucleus. This "resonance" in energies is key; it greatly enhances the rate of the next fusion step-making carbon-12. The second coincidence is that the nuclei of beryllium-8 just happen to be stable for long enough for them to have a good chance of catching one of those helium nuclei as they buzz around. And finally, the new carbon-12 nucleus is not efficient about immediately fusing with any spare helium nuclei to make a heavier oxygen nucleus-the carbon doesn't get gobbled up into oxygen, and lives to build your DNA a few billion years later.”
― Caleb Scharf, The Zoomable Universe: An Epic Tour Through Cosmic Scale, from Almost Everything to Nearly Nothing

“Normally, you exist at a scale where your body consists of a thousand trillion trillion atoms in an assembly ten billion times larger than a single atom. And you move around quickly, at meters per second. Any diffraction in passing from one scale to the next smaller power of ten has been beyond your perception, or that of any current measurement device. But now, at this tiny scale of a tenth of a billion of a meter, you can't waltz through a doorway between magnitudes and hope to be just fine. The particle-wave duality of matter-the deeper truth of reality- is in full force. On these scales the universe is a place of probabilities, of statistics, a dance of a multitude of branching pathways and curious relationships. That weirdness is at the heart of reality-it is what lets us exist.”
― Caleb Scharf, The Zoomable Universe: An Epic Tour Through Cosmic Scale, from Almost Everything to Nearly Nothing

“At this scale what you actually sense is a space of possibilities, of ethereal electrostatic pushes and pulls. The closest comparison we can make to this experience is a blindfolded tasting of unknown foods and flavors. There is a menu of such sensations here, unique flourishes lined up end to end. Here's an entity we call a carbon atom. Here are ones called oxygen, nitrogen, hydrogen. They're clumped together as other recognizable things, relatively simple molecules called nucleotides: adenine, thymine, guanine, cytosine, arrayed along a pair of sugar-phosphate rails that curve off into the distance in either direction. But what any of these look like is no longer entirely meaningful. What is meaningful is the "state" of these entities, their electromagnetic energies, their vibrations and rotations, their still-intangible patterns of presence. Walking among them you are buffeted by a multitude of calls and entreaties in the form of attractions and repulsions, yet this seemingly disordered cacophony is shot through with regularity and information.”
― Caleb Scharf, The Zoomable Universe: An Epic Tour Through Cosmic Scale, from Almost Everything to Nearly Nothing

“The lengrh of all human DNA on planet earth is 58 million light-years.”
― Caleb Scharf, The Zoomable Universe: An Epic Tour Through Cosmic Scale, from Almost Everything to Nearly Nothing

“The length of all DNA in your body's cells is 74 billion kilometers (or 193,000 times the distance from the earth to the moon).”
― Caleb Scharf, The Zoomable Universe: An Epic Tour Through Cosmic Scale, from Almost Everything to Nearly Nothing

“In animals, for example, there is an observed mathematical relationship between basal metabolic rate (how fast animals burn chemical energy while resting) and body mass. This relationship actually holds from bacteria to tiny shrews, and all the way up to enormous blue whales: the metabolic rate increases with body mass to the power of three-quarters. That's a law that runs across the whole 10^22 span of masses for living things.”
― Caleb Scharf, The Zoomable Universe: An Epic Tour Through Cosmic Scale, from Almost Everything to Nearly Nothing

“A typical hand contains 29 major joints, 123 ligaments, 34 muscles, 48 nerves, and 30 arteries.”
― Caleb Scharf, The Zoomable Universe: An Epic Tour Through Cosmic Scale, from Almost Everything to Nearly Nothing

“The gloriously bright daytime side of the Earth is therefore not just a pretty sight. It signals a relentless absorption of electromagnetic radiation. Earth reflects, but it also acts like a giant sponge for photons that would otherwise streak off into the rest of the cosmos. We may be a small world, but we cast a long shadow.”
― Caleb Scharf, The Zoomable Universe: An Epic Tour Through Cosmic Scale, from Almost Everything to Nearly Nothing

“On the daytime side of Earth, the solar radiation hitting the top fo the atmosphere deposits around 1,300 watts of power per square meter. That's about the same amount used by an electric kettle. It doesn't seem like a great deal.

But add up that incoming solar radiation across one whole hemisphere of Earth, and a total of about 174 petawatts (10^15, or a quadrillion, watts) of solar power is hitting the top of the atmosphere. A colossal total of 89 petawatts of that same power is absorbed by the surface of the Earth directly. The rest is reflected by the surface, or absorbed by the atmosphere reflected by its clouds of condensed water.

By human standards this is a fearsome amount of Energy. Estimates of current human energy consumption suggest that in a single year we use roughly 1.6 X 10^11 megawatt-hours, which means that with 8,760 hours in a year we are using energy at a rate of about 0.018 petawatts. All life on Earth (adding up photosynthetic organisms, water transpiration in plants, and what life gets from chemical and geophysical energy) is estimated to consume energy at a rate of between 0.1 and 5 petawatts. In other words, despite life's potent footpirnt on the planet, on a cosmic scale it's still barely sipping at what the Sun's photons rain down on us.”
― Caleb Scharf, The Zoomable Universe: An Epic Tour Through Cosmic Scale, from Almost Everything to Nearly Nothing

“Bose-Einstein Condensate - Cool objects such as helium atoms to nearly absolute zero and they can clump into a single quantum entity. Individual atoms lose their identity, becoming part of a "super-atom." Even photons can make a Bose-Einstein condensate, in the right conditions.”
― Caleb Scharf, The Zoomable Universe: An Epic Tour Through Cosmic Scale, from Almost Everything to Nearly Nothing

“Out in our neck of the woods-26,000 light-years (2.5 X 10^20 meters) from the galactic center-stars follow orbital paths that take them around the galaxy roughly every 230 million years. Our Sun is thought to be in the middle of its twentieth trip, or "galactic year." But our neighboring stars are not all perfectly synchronized in this motion. We're more like a slightly discombobulated flock of birds.”
― Caleb Scharf, The Zoomable Universe: An Epic Tour Through Cosmic Scale, from Almost Everything to Nearly Nothing

“The idea of the existence of WIMPS fits with many cosmic measurements, including the inferred gravitational fields of galaxies and clusters of galaxies, the observation of gravitational lensing, and the patterns of the cosmic microwave background radiation. The snag is that no WIMP has ever been detected directly, and a number of Earth- bound experiments are actively searching for them. It's possible that instead of there being dark matter, there is something incomplete in our understanding of the nature of gravity itself.”
― Caleb Scharf, The Zoomable Universe: An Epic Tour Through Cosmic Scale, from Almost Everything to Nearly Nothing

“These bubble-like cosmic voids can span scales of more than thirty million light-years (3 X 10^23 meters). In these regions the density of matter is less than one-tenth of the average density of the universe, which makes these places quite depressing, unless you enjoy emptiness.”
― Caleb Scharf, The Zoomable Universe: An Epic Tour Through Cosmic Scale, from Almost Everything to Nearly Nothing

“If you were a hapless cosmic hitchhiker stranded between the stars of the Milky Way, your body would represent a concentration of matter a hundred million trillion times greater than the sparse interstellar space around you. To put that another way, take a look at the tip of your little finger. That pinky end contains about 10^23 atoms. That number is the same as the total number of atoms in a sphere of about 100 million cubic kilometers of typical interstellar void.”
― Caleb Scharf, The Zoomable Universe: An Epic Tour Through Cosmic Scale, from Almost Everything to Nearly Nothing

“With enough infalling matter, a spinning black hole can convert mass to energy with higher efficiency than even nuclear fusion. The most luminous cases across the universe shine with the power of hundreds of trillions of suns.”
― Caleb Scharf, The Zoomable Universe: An Epic Tour Through Cosmic Scale, from Almost Everything to Nearly Nothing

“For example, add two identical balls of dough together, and the new radius of the combined ball is not twice what it was; it's only about 26 percent larger. Why? Because for ordinary materials in a sphere the radius grows as the cube root of the mass-double the mass and you only increase the size by 26 percent.”
― Caleb Scharf, The Zoomable Universe: An Epic Tour Through Cosmic Scale, from Almost Everything to Nearly Nothing

“In only five orders of magnitude, we reach the pocket-change of our local universe.”
― Caleb Scharf, The Zoomable Universe: An Epic Tour Through Cosmic Scale, from Almost Everything to Nearly Nothing

“Remarkably,on the journey from 10^27 meters to 10^23 meters, in just five factors of ten we transition down from the size of the observable universe (the cosmic horizon) to our own cosmic neighborhood of Local Group galaxies.”
― Caleb Scharf, The Zoomable Universe: An Epic Tour Through Cosmic Scale, from Almost Everything to Nearly Nothing

“Some estimates, based on analyses of the known geometry of space-time, suggest that the "full" universe could extend at least 250 cosmic horizons farther. Other estimates, based on the very rapid expansion-or inflation-of the universe in its very early youth, suggest that the universe may be on the order of 10^23 times larger than the part we will ever see, or ever access.”
― Caleb Scharf, The Zoomable Universe: An Epic Tour Through Cosmic Scale, from Almost Everything to Nearly Nothing

“1 Hundred Quadrillion Seconds (10 ^ 17) for light to travel from cosmic horizon to us.”
― Caleb Scharf, The Zoomable Universe: An Epic Tour Through Cosmic Scale, from Almost Everything to Nearly Nothing

“.1 millimeters (10 ^ -4 meters) is halfway between 10^-35 meters and 10^27 meters on a logarithmic scale: as large compared to the Planck scale as the whole observable universe is to .1 millimeters.”
― Caleb Scharf, The Zoomable Universe: An Epic Tour Through Cosmic Scale, from Almost Everything to Nearly Nothing

“There are about 2.5 billion (10^9) seconds in a human lifetime.”
― Caleb Scharf, The Zoomable Universe: An Epic Tour Through Cosmic Scale, from Almost Everything to Nearly Nothing

“Our biological awareness seldom strays below a few millimeters or above a few kilometers. That is 6 orders of magnitude out of some 62.”
― Caleb Scharf, The Zoomable Universe: An Epic Tour Through Cosmic Scale, from Almost Everything to Nearly Nothing