Secret Worlds: The Universe Within

Here’s something I’ve shared with a number of people but, for some reason, have not yet posted. It’s called Secret Worlds: The Universe Within, and offers the opportunity to take a journey from the cosmos:

10 million light years from the Earth, through space towards the Earth in successive orders of magnitude until you reach a tall oak tree just outside the buildings of the National High Magnetic Field Laboratory in Tallahassee, Florida. After that, begin to move from the actual size of a leaf into a microscopic world that reveals leaf cell walls, the cell nucleus, chromatin, DNA and finally, into the subatomic universe of electrons and protons.

I often use this website as a way to communicate the challenge associated with a “unified theory of everything.” We want one set of understandable principles that apply equally to galaxies (which are 20 – 25 orders of magnitude larger than our familiar world of ballpoint pens and automobiles), as well as to the tiniest building blocks of the universe, perhaps infinitesimally small vibrating strings of energy (that are 20 – 25 orders of magnitude smaller than these everyday objects in our lives).

Taking this journey, for me at least, underscores the audacity of supposing that this unified theory exists at all. And if it does exist, is the human intellect, even that of the Stephen Hawkings of the world, up to the task of apprehending it?

I’m reminded of a quote from British-born geneticist and evolutionary biologist John Burdon Sanderson Haldane:  “The universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose.”

Enjoy.