The Scale of the Universe
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What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Hello, welcome to the Mess of Science. This is Hannah Fry. And this is Michael Stevens. Wow, that was a that was a pretty good radio voice. That was j I think I sort of doubted myself halfway through. Anyway, this is Field Notes, which is which is basically a
Grown up version of show and tell. That's right. And today I'm showing and telling something that I did not make, but you and I inspired Hannah. Oh. Yeah. It's it's pretty cool. In fact, it almost makes me feel guilty. It's so cool. So if you remember of many episodes ago, we were talking about weird coincidences. Uh-huh. And we mentioned that human cells are like exactly halfway between the small. Size possible and the largest size possible. We are right in the smack middle. What does that mean? I don't know. Well, on our subreddit, a user named Burrow or Burrough. Baroo. Baroo. Кру. Yeah. What matters is that it's really cool. I'm gonna send you in our chat the Reddit thread and we'll put this in the description in the episode notes for everyone to visit.
There's like and read the comments because there's like multiple versions of it.
Um
This visualization shows an incredible journey that I'm gonna take you through. And for those of you listening, going, visualization, uh, whoa, problem. Don't worry, I'm gonna walk you through it. What we're gonna do is we're going to imagine a little game that you play with your friend. Okay. This is just giving a lot more color to this fact. So imagine that you start at The size of the Planck length, which is what? It's the smallest size physics as we understand it today can describe. Anything smaller than that, literally, we don't know. Is it even possible? It's up for debate. It's almost a philosophical question. Can you observe something as small as the Planck length? No. Yeah. If you got light. Or any kind of information out of something that small, or you tried to, it would turn into a black hole.
Okay? And and and exactly why is is a discussion we've we've had before, we can have again, but it's the smallest point. Now imagine your friend is as large as the observable universe. Okay? The largest thing we can observe, the entire observable universe. And you both agree to start shrinking and growing until you. meet in the middle. So every second you get 10 times bigger, and every second your friend gets 10 times smaller. This is what you're going to see. Okay, so you you begin this little game and you start growing, your friend starts shrinking. For the first 10 seconds, you getting bigger are like super lonely. There's like nothing between a a Planck length and then a neutrino. Okay. Oh, yeah. There's like nothing.
Nothing's going on. Meanwhile, your friend, who's getting 10 times smaller every second, is passing the size of, you know, um the the great voids in the universe, um, super clustered. Like Lania Keo, where we are, our local group, Galaxies, Andromeda, the Milky Way. Eventually, after 10 seconds of this game, you are now as large as a neutrino, which is 2.8 Yadometers across. And your friend is the size of the Ring Nebula, which is 1.3 light years across.
This episode
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Chapters
6 chapters
1
What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
0:00–5:42
2
What is the premise of the “Scale of the Universe” visualisation?
5:42–6:43
3
How does the powers‑of‑10 game work and why does it start at the Planck length?
6:43–17:04
4
When do the two travelers meet in the middle and what is that size?
17:04–17:53
5
Why is the human egg cell the exact midpoint between the smallest and largest scales?
17:53–36:27
6
What evidence supports the idea that the Planck length could be the universe’s smallest pixel?
36:27–47:07