My brother, who is retired, spends a lot of time looking over the internet. He also has friends that do the same. As a result I sometimes get the most interesting things in my inbox. This morning was one of the most interesting of all. This little gem was called The Scale of the Universe 2. This is a scalable animation from the visible Universe down to the Planck Length, the smallest possible measurable length there is. Developed by Michael and Cary Huang, who from the name of their site ( http://htwins.net) must be twin brothers, it is one of the most amazing representations of the scale I have ever experienced. Now I have seen plenty of scaling pictures in the past, but nothing of this scope. Almost every imaginable object is represented. Quarks, viruses, ants, dinosaurs, planets, stars, nebula, star clusters, galaxies and galactic clusters. And clicking on any object brings up a box of information about that object. Did you know that ants make up 15-20 % of all animals on Earth? I didn’t.
Now I am a very visual person. I like to see the things I write about. I draw things to scale to get an idea of what they might look like to a character who is viewing them. This little webpage is a wonderful resource for my visual brain. Just looking at the scale from 10-6 to 10-9 started ideas flowing about nanotechnology that would not have come otherwise. Oh, they might have eventually materialized. But not in such numbers as appeared within seconds of looking at the objects in relation to each other. I highly recommend this page to anyone who has an interest in either the very small or the very large. It gives a truly personal look at all of reality. It shows how we are almost infinitely larger than the smallest, and almost infinitely smaller than the largest. And how everything is almost all nothing, which gives sense to the ideas of Neutron Stars and Black Holes, cramming so much of what we consider to be real into such small (in the case of black holes infinitesimal) areas. Give this page a look and see if you feel the same wonder I do.
The Scale of the Universe 2