A Matter of Scale

As far as we can tell, the universe is infinitely large, and the ever reddening glow tells us that it is further expanding at the speed of light. We are not built to understand such scales. We couldn’t, even if they were static, and they are not. 

It cannot be sensed, not with our limitations, what Stepen Baxter refers to as our “human plumbing.”  An analogy is this: the list of all numbers is just as large as the list of only the odd numbers. Chew on that for a moment.

In the small hours of the night, and in the lone hours of the day, like so many others I have cut myself trying to feel the weight of eternity. I’ve punished myself imagining what it would be like to be an atom somewhere in a field that has never been stepped on, entirely out of time. Well, outside of human time. Bees don’t know it’s the 21st century, trees don’t know the boundaries of the countries they are rooted in, rocks don’t know the time of day. 

What would it be like to be there, unnoticed, through the dusk of earth, the long evening of our solar system, the red night at the end of our sun, the dark of encroaching entropy, the nothingness inside of the true passage of time?

And what if I were an atom embedded within the mantle of the earth. Would the weight of eternity feel the same? Different?

What if I were an atom being pushed through the universe, occasionally being redirected by the solar wind of some star?

Once, when I was small, I fell asleep just as the sun was setting. I woke and the sun was beginning to rise. My father asked me if I would go with him to the store. So I went. And I remember being excited at seeing the world waking up. I don’t think I’d ever been up that early and out on an errand. I stared out the window in wonder, feeling the chill of the morning and seeing few people out walking. Where were they going to so early? What dreams had they had?

It didn’t take long before I realized the sky was getting darker, not lighter, and by the time we reached the store the clock on the wall confirmed that when I had slept it had been for a mere hour, not the entire night. It was a very odd night, then, trying to convince myself that the wakefulness I felt was false, an early lesson of the veil of the world being pulled back. 

It occurred to me that the perception of the passage of time was malleable. Of course, I didn’t think of it in those words, not then. But how could I have been so wrong? I was sure that several hours, a full night’s hours, had passed when I fell asleep. Did time fool me, or did I fool time?

Later, I learned to also distrust my dreams. I was very good at remembering my dreams. There were even a few years when I was good about writing them down as soon as I woke up. But then I learned that dreams only occur during REM sleep, which in turn only takes up 20 to 30% of our time asleep. But my dreams felt like they had taken all night! Why didn’t I feel any of the rest of the time?! I swear sometimes my dreams were entire lifetimes! And yet, 70 to 80% of my time unconscious was simply not there! Those lifetimes happened in the last hour of a night’s sleep!

The rest of the time was oblivion.

This thought stayed with me and grew as I grew and one day merged with my sessions where I tried to feel the weight of time. Scary, I tell you. I don’t consider myself terribly intelligent, and oftentimes very simple observations escape me. This doesn’t bother me, though, as I realize that more often than not, if I wait long enough, interesting connections happen, all on their own, kind of like proteins doing interesting things all on their own given enough time.

One day I thought, if I can fall asleep for a few hours and when I wake up I feel like no time has passed, then is it not possible that the distance between one moment and a moment a thousand years later might feel the same? Well, why not? A person who wakes up from a coma is shocked to hear that weeks or months or years have passed. Why not?

It follows then, that I might fall asleep now, and wake up a million years away and it would still feel the same! I could fall asleep and wake up on the very last day the universe exists and I would still be me, groggy, trying to remember that night’s dream!

To me, a moment tomorrow would be exactly the same as a moment at the end of time; a matter of scale.

But I started talking about the size of the universe. None of us can truly accept the distances between bodies in our solar system, not even astronomers. We come up with analogies but even they pale. It’s like trying to define love. You can come up with examples and metaphors are you like, but a definition eludes us. 

Now try this. Imagine being a proton, one of countless, floating through the spaces between. At a microcosmic scale the space within atoms is comparable to the space between the planets in our solar system. Over 99.9% of an atom is empty, the empty space within our solar system slightly emptier still. 

Imagine a proton trying to comprehend the space between itself and whatever neutrons and electrons it is locked to, and then trying to even begin to grasp the space between the stars, the galaxies, the clusters, the expanding universe .  .   .     .

They may as well be the same thing. No meaningful distinction exists.

I used to think how lucky I am to exist in a corner of the universe where so many molecules are in such proximity to one another that I get to experience love and hate and joy and loss and confusion and nostalgia, but really, were I a proton the space between everything in my universe is indistinguishable from forever. The spaces within the heart of the sun are exactly the same as the space between galaxies to a proton!

We marvel every time science finds a new black hole, like the one 66 Billion times as massive as our sun, or observes areas containing no stars, like the Bootes Void that is over 300 million light years of absolutely nothing, but to an atom they would look the same.

Don’t think on these things too long. But do think on them. And then, one day a connection might happen. One where you remember that space and time are not independent of one another, but rather that they are tied. 

And arrive at the realization that spacetime is also a matter of scale.

11.19.2023 – 10.25.2025