There is a wonderful and infinitely thrilling sense of vertigo that goes along with science. The mind boggling numbers, the impossible to comprehend tracks of space not only in the macro universe but also the micro is amazing. It scares the shit out of a lot of people who's reaction is to feel insignificant or immaterial. They seem to feel the vastness of space only serves to make them smaller. In the words of Richard Dawkins, "some people find this thought disturbing, I find the reality thrilling."
There was a wonderful exhibit at the natural history museum in Boston. Though it might have been the science museum, in fact it probably was. The exhibit consisted of a big room. In the center of the room was a giant globe, at least two stories high, ringed by a walk way. Set on displays along the walk way were plagues and objects, from the size of a grain of sand up through a beach ball. Each plaque read with a note on the comparative size of the object to the giant sphere if the object where A and the sphere B. For instance a pingpong ball might be labeled "if the sphere is jupiter this is the earth." From the macro to the micro, comparing the ball to a microbe and the sphere to a drop of water and such. I remember this being the most delightful exhibit in the museum as it allowed the mind to venture into that terrifying and thrilling realm of imaginary SCALE!
More thrilling even than the vastness of space or the constant interchange of atoms, I think, is the capacity for the human mind to comprehend and hold even a fraction of the information, or to infer, from almost nothing, things we can not even see! The capacity for the human mind to expostulate and imagine and THINK.
Some physicist said that he thought that not only is the universe stranger than we think, but is stranger than we can think. That's what the scale of it all is to me. I can manage the information as information, but not really experience it IN FACT.
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