Did you know that a recent study estimates that there are about 70 trillion cells in a human body? Did you know that only about 30 trillion, or so, of them are human cells? The rest are microbes of one kind or another. Yes, that does mean that there are more non-human cells, mostly bacteria, than human cells in a person. Kind of gives you a new respect for bacteria. The good parts are all human, of course, but you also couldn’t live without your bacterial friends.
Our current national debt is about $34 trillion dollars. Sounds like a lot, right? It is a lot. But what does “a lot” really mean. How about saying it like this: 34 thousand billion. Or this: 34 million million. Seems like an even bigger lot when you say it like that. But do we really have a handle on even what numbers like “million” and “billion” mean, much less “trillion”? For most of us, our minds go “ten”, “one hundred”, “one thousand”, and then, “a lot”. For a little perspective, try this: you know how long a second is, right? There are 60 seconds in a minute. There are 3600 seconds in an hour. That gives you some feel for a thousand. It’s a lot, but not so much that you can’t really wrap your head around it. How about this: there are only 86,000 seconds in an entire day. Only about 600,000 seconds in a whole week. It takes about 11 and a half days worth of seconds to get to 1 million. 1 million feet is about 190 miles, or just about the distance from New York to Boston. 1 million steps would just about take you from New York to Boston and back. That means that 1 BILLION seconds is about 11,500 days. That is 31 and a half years. A billion seconds ago was 1992. 1 billion feet is 190,000 miles which is over 7 and a half times around the circumference of the Earth. It’s almost the distance to the moon. A billion is a REALLY big number. A trillion is a thousand times that big.
So the point to all of this is an idea called “scale”, and it’s a really important thing to grasp when you start talking about the natural world. Science casts a really wide net—particle physicists look at subatomic (smaller than atoms) particles, like neutrinos, on the order of 0.0000000000000000001 meters (1 attometer) in diameter. A really tall person is about 2 meters tall (a meter is about 39 inches, so a 2m tall person is about 6 foot 6). The universe is about 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 meters (1 octillion meters) across. So, if you take the range from the smallest things (subatomic particles) to the size of the universe, that is a range of 45 orders of magnitude (an order of magnitude is when you add a zero to a number, like when you go from 10 to 100). To put it another way, the biggest thing we know about is 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 (that is 45 zeros, 1 million million million million million, or 1 quattourdecillion) times bigger than the smallest thing we know of. This is a very cool web site that demonstrates the scale of large and small: http://htwins.net/scale2/ .
I’ve always thought it was fun to think of stuff like that. Mostly pointless little facts—things like an average tree has about 100,000 leaves on it—give you a sense of the mystery, majesty and grandeur of the natural world. What goes on inside each of those 100,000 leaves is truly miraculous, but that’s a story for another day.
I’m going to be writing artcles on science—everything from the tall to the small, to paraphrase my favorite doctor (Seuss)—from one end of all those zeros to the other. I’ll write about anything you want to know. Science topics in the news, things that are important to you or things you’ve just always wondered about. You all get to choose. Send me your questions and suggestions and I’ll try to do what I can to answer. Do keep in mind that, while I am a scientist, I’m not Mr. Wizard or Bill Nye, the Science Guy. I’m a Neurophysiologist, not a Physicist, engineer or Organic Chemist, and I’m not a physician. I have to look things up, too. I’m better with some topics than with others, and I am wrong, sometimes. I just try not to STAY wrong. If I don’t get any good questions during the week, or if I think of something that seems particularly important or interesting, I’ll pick the topic, but I’d rather hear from you. I don’t care if you are six or ninety-six. Don’t think that science isn’t for you or that you won’t understand my article. I’ll write it so everyone can get something from it. I have loved science all my life, and I want you to learn to love it, too. When I was a professor, one of the things I heard students say that used to annoy me the worst was “I’m just not good at science”. We are ALL scientists. Some of us just don’t realize it. If you use electricity, you are a scientist. If you know where to put a roof bolt in a coal mine, you are a scientist. If you cook, you are a scientist. If you are a farmer, you are a scientist. If you are a kid, you are the very best kind of scientist. Let me hear from you. This is going to be fun! I promise. It is also going to be useful and maybe a little important to you. You see, every aspect of your life, every second of the day, is impacted by science. If you don’t have a basic understanding of the principles of science, you are at a great disadvantage. If you have just a little knowledge of the basics of science—what is called “scientific literacy”—then you have a leg up on understanding things, from where you fit into the universe to what your pancreas is doing to what all that fuss is in the news about GMOs and global warming. Not to mention, it just makes life a lot more interesting and fun.