Your Home, the Universe - Learn, Think, Be Transformed

Our nearest celestial neighbor, Proxima Centauri of the Alpha Centauri trio of stars, is 4.22 light years away. Let's try to get some perspective on that distance. Light travels at 186 thousand miles per second or 700 million miles per hour. The distance from Earth to the Moon is roughly 239 thousand miles so what would take us roughly 26 days to travel in a 747 jet, light does in a little over a second. Light would circle our planet at the equator about 7 times in a second; 7 times around the earth in the amount of time it would take you to swat a fly. At those speeds Usain Bolt might even be impressed. So now that you have some sense of how fast light travels, consider this - if you took a ride on a beam of light, it would take you 4.22 years or 4 birthdays to reach our closest star, little Proxima, which is about the tenth of the size of our star, the Sun. It is really unimaginably far away and yet it is the closest, I repeat the closest, of the roughly 5000 or so stars visible to the naked eye. And now consider this, the 5000 or so stars you marvel at in the night sky are among the 200 billion (billion with a "b") that you don't see because they are so far away their light is getting washed out by all the light and pollution in our atmosphere. In our relatively tiny galaxy, the Milky Way, it would take you 100 thousand years, traveling at the speed of light, to pass all of these stars and travel from one side of our galaxy to the other. Our solar system, the handful of planets circling our star the Sun, is a tiny little speck which sits in an obscure location about 30 thousand light years from the center of our galaxy.

The size of our galaxy quickly becomes unfathomable. And in the scope of our Universe, it is just our small backyard, a tiny little swath of land on a large expansive planet. The diameter of our Universe is atleast 93 billion light years (it takes light 93 billion years to traverse) and our Universe contains hundreds of billions of galaxies (such as our Milky Way), each containing hundreds of billions of stars. Remember, galaxies contain lots of stars like our sun and the stars contain orbiting planets. The largest known galaxies have diameters of more than 6 million light years. They have way more stars than our galaxy and far greater number of planets. If you've ever taken a long flight, you'll agree that Earth feels like a pretty big place. And our Universe isn't even sure if Earth is there or not - we don't notice specs of dust and Universe doesn't notice us. But I digress.

This is the world of Newtonian physics - observable, measurable, predictable in its motions, mass and velocity. Let's change direction and go from the big out there observable Universe to the small stuff it is all made of. The following you've studied in your high school science class and may vaguely remember the details.

Objects that take up space and have mass, from the computer screen you are reading this on to the elephants in India, are called matter. Everything around you is made up of matter. Matter, in turn is made up of molecules. Molecules, collections of things called atoms, are so small that there are more in your body than there are stars in the Universe. You can pause to think about that. Atoms are so small that you cannot see them with the naked eye or even with a powerful microscope - there can be as little as two to as many as hundreds of millions in a single molecule. Atoms never die, every atom in our body existed since the beginning of time. When you breathe, you take in millions of atoms - some will remain part of you, others will be exhaled into the atmosphere and become a part of some other matter.

Things are getting pretty small but we're still in the world of Newtonian physics - observable, measurable, predictable in mass, motion, velocity. This is the world that we experience through our five senses and which forms our understanding of reality.

Now let's go a little further down, to the world of modern quantum physics and subatomic particles. Throw out everything you know or think you know about reality. Atoms are made up of mostly empty space and three types of particles: protons, neutrons and electrons. Protons and neutrons make up most of the mass of an atom - in a 150 pound person, more than 149 pounds would be made up of protons and neutrons. Electrons are extremely small, a thousandth the size of a proton. If an electron were the size of an apple, you would be enormous, you would be so enormous that light would take a full day to travel from your toes to your nose. In the NBA, you would get a lot of double teams.

Electrons and even smaller, more elementary particles are so small that they have no mass and they behave very oddly, none of the laws of Newtonian physics apply. They cannot be directly observed or measured and one cannot predict their motion or velocity. They can be in two places at once and they can appear and disappear. All we can do is calculate probabilities that they will exist or behave in certain ways.

Electrons and even smaller, more elementary particles are so small that they have no mass and they behave very oddly, none of the laws of Newtonian physics apply. They cannot be directly observed or measured and one cannot predict their motion or velocity. They can be in two places at once and they can appear and disappear. All we can do is calculate probabilities that they will exist or behave in certain ways and they are indiscernible as matter or energy. Strange huh? What's even stranger is that modern physics is showing that a subatomic particle can be influenced by a particle hundreds of miles away, suggesting a connection between things which goes well beyond our current understanding.

So this is, in very basic and elementary terms, the size, structure and composition of our universe. It's a strange, magnificently beautiful, awe inspiring place. If you spend some time learning about it and thinking about it, for just a few minutes each week, and odd thing may happen. Your brain may start to see your reality from a different lens.

You may find peculiar the notion that God might be preoccupied with our fashion, our choice of meat or whether or not we acknowledge his one true son.

You may find the impulse to self-aggrandize a tad bit silly and humility a little more befitting.

You may find your mortality and your presumed finite time in this life a little less haunting.

You may find a deeper connection to all living and non living things.

You may find spirituality in the magic of the natural world.

And you may finally see humanity in more universal terms