[lit-ideas] Re: Sunday Twofer

  • From: John Wager <john.wager1@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
  • To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
  • Date: Tue, 30 Oct 2012 11:35:23 -0500

David Ritchie wrote:
We are really quite small.  Some of us are smaller than others, and some of us 
act as if we are bigger or more important than others but the facts are clear: 
on any continent you care to name, no matter how tall we stand, we are smaller 
than space, that whole big thing with twinkles in.  It's huge.  You know that; 
me too.   Every time I try to compass or even simply to watch it go about its 
business my little mind, possibly to prove a point, just says no.
Equally fascinating and equally important: We are really quite enormous. We're bigger than half the stuff around us, and smaller than half the stuff, give or take 1 or 2 powers of ten. From the largest expanses of inter-galactic spaces to us is just about as big a difference as that between us and the quarks that make us up. There is just as much empty space inside us, relatively speaking, as there is "out there."

We're really where Pascal said we were: Half-way between the infinitely large and infinitely small.

This is also true in terms of knowledge; We don't know much, but we're able to at least imagine the vast sizes we occupy and are occupied by, something nothing else we are aware of can do. Our imaginations can spin out a term like "universe" or "quark" or "galaxy" and then wonder what's for lunch. That's a pretty big imagination, if you ask me!



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