by Ziya Tong
Our experiences tell us that reality is human-sized, but our technology tell us it’s not. On the true scale of things, we are microscopic giants—massive and puny at the same time. And yet, even within this unimaginably boundless realm, we have a surprising “place.” Positioned between these micro and macro realities, you are closer in scale to the farthest reaches of the known universe than you are to the Planck length.
* * *
—
THE NEXT TIME YOU ARE ALONE in a room, take a moment to consider that everything around you, every surface, every breath of air, every inch of your bare skin, is alive and humming with invisible life. And then remember that from up in the sky, let’s say for a plane passing by overhead, you too are just an invisible speck.
Galileo’s genius was in realizing that what humans could perceive was only a mere slice of reality. And while he was the first to see beyond the old world view, he was troubled by how others refused to open their eyes.*37 In 1632, in Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems, he wrote,
In the long run my observations have convinced me that some men, reasoning preposterously, first establish some conclusion in their minds which, either because of its being their own or because of their having received it from some person who has their entire confidence, impresses them so deeply that one finds it impossible ever to get it out of their heads. Such arguments in support of their fixed idea as they hit upon themselves or hear set forth by others, no matter how simple and stupid these may be, gain their instant acceptance and applause. On the other hand whatever is brought forward against it, however ingenious and conclusive, they receive with disdain or with hot rage—if indeed it does not make them ill. Beside themselves with passion, some of them would not be backward even about scheming to suppress and silence their adversaries.
Galileo poked at the reality bubble, and he was punished for doing so. After the first injunction against him in 1616, he could no longer hold, defend, or teach Copernican astronomy. In 1633, he was tried again, this time by the Roman Inquisition, and was found guilty. Because of his fame and old age, however, the great astronomer was spared the heretic’s punishment of torture and death. Instead, Galileo was fated to spend the rest of his life under house arrest.
It is quite something when you consider that two of science’s greatest men—Van Leeuwenhoek, the father of microscopy, and Galileo, the father of modern astronomy—both spent years being mocked for seeing the true nature of reality. In the end, both had the final word: Van Leeuwenhoek was recognized by the Royal Society and became eminent among his peers; Galileo is now considered one of the greatest thinkers who ever lived. But Galileo, also known as the “father of modern science,” left behind more than just a scientific legacy.
On March 12, 1737, ninety-five years after his death, Galileo’s grave was robbed. The thief was Anton Francesco Gori, a professor, who cut off three of Galileo’s fingers when his body was being moved from a temporary tomb to the Basilica di Santa Croce in Florence. The practice of removing dead saints’ fingers and other body parts was common, as the relics were believed to hold sacred powers. Gori was honouring Galileo as a martyr, a secular saint of science, who blasted apart old beliefs and liberated us with his thinking.
It was almost two centuries later, in 1927, when the first of Galileo’s missing fingers was found. Today, it is on display at Florence’s Galileo Museum. The symbolism, for those who know the story, is hard to miss. There, sealed in a glass jar, defiantly pointing to the heavens, is Galileo’s middle finger.
*1 Tim Cockerill discovered a new species of parasitic wasp when it “committed suicide” and fell into his cup of tea one day.
*2 You’ve likely heard Newton’s famous quote: “If I have seen further than others, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.” (emphasis mine) It’s often cited as a reminder of the power of humility. Except, some scholars today believe it may have been the 17th century version of throwing academic shade. It came from a letter written by Newton to Hooke in which they were embroiled in a scientific feud over credit in the field of optics. And Hooke, it should be noted, was short.
*3 Based on his drawings, Van Leeuwenhoek is thought to have made some instruments that could magnify objects up to 500 times.
*4 Oral bacteria are prolific: “There are 20 billion bacteria in your mouth and they reproduce every five hours. If you go 24 hours without brushing, those 20 billion become 100 billion!”
*5 “The flea has killed millions around the world…and is, indissolubly, connected with the history of Black Death. This disease in man is, in fact, caused—as demonstrated by Yersin and Simond—by the triad: bacterium (Yersinia pestis)/rat/flea (Xenopsylla cheopis).”
*6 While pesticide manufacturers have argued that the world will face food shortages without pesticides, scientists have found that the claim is overstated, and that the majority of farms would increase productivity if they lowered their use of pesticides.
*7 While more scientific research is required, the plummeting numbers are setting off alarms around the world. A recent study in Puerto Rico found that 98 percent of ground insects had disappeared over a period of 35 years. In the canopy, the number was 80 percent. By weight, insects typically outweigh humans seventeen times over. Without them, we can expect catastrophic consequences. That’s because insects serve as the foundation of our food chain. If insects decline, a domino effect, known as a “bottom-up trophic cascade,” will begin to knock out other species that rely on them.
*8 Pulex irritans has not gone extinct. It can still be found in Greece, Iran, Madagascar, and even Arizona.
*9 Age appears to be a factor, as babies have fewer mites.
*10 Bacterial cells are much smaller than human cells—though there are a lot of them, they make up only about .2 kg of our body weight.
*11 There are almost 2 billion species of bacteria, the vast majority of which are harmless to human beings.
*12 Relatively but not entirely. There is bacteria in the placenta. “Scientists have spotted bacteria in amniotic fluid, blood in the umbilical cord, the membrane that surrounds the fetus and even babies’ first poop.”
*13 Today, one particular species does this brilliantly. Described as “the most important microbe you’ve never heard of,” Prochlorococcas is responsible for manufacturing a full 20 percent of the oxygen we breathe.
*14 Like mitochondria, chloroplasts have their own DNA that comes from the cyanobacteria.
*15 Small animals tend to live shorter lives.
*16 The largest recorded ape primate in the fossil record was Gigantopithecus blacki, a three-metre- tall ape. It was doomed by its size in a different manner, however. During the Ice Age, the food supply became insufficient to support the giant ape.
*17 For more on size I direct the reader to J.B.S. Haldane’s paper “On Being the Right Size.”
*18 Another factor that scientists believe may affect how marine animals grow to be big in water has to do with loss of heat. Marine mammals grow bigger and have more blubber, as they increase their volume to surface area. This allows them to generate more heat but lose less of it through the surface area of their skin.
*19 The Carboniferous era was specifically from the Devonian period 358.9 million years ago, to the beginning of the Permian period, 298.9 million years ago.
*20 Having a larger volume to surface area also meant that the oxygen amount would still be relative to body size, so the animals wouldn’t die from oxygen toxicity either.
*21 There are many interesting incidences of size changes due to environment. Of note, there is Foster’s rule, which states that in island environments large animals tend to develop smaller bodies due to restricted food sources, and small animals tend to get larger due to limits in predation. An example of this can be found in mammoths. A mammoth species that lived in Crete, 3.5 million years ago, stood about only one metre at the shoulder.
*22 Looking at more than 17, 000 marine species, researchers have found that since the
time the animals first evolved, body volumes have increased by five orders of magnitude.
*23 As always, there are exceptions. For instance, climate change is making wolf spiders bigger.
*24 Historically, scientists have documented mammalian dwarfing during warming periods in the Earth’s history. And during the Palaeocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum, a warming phase of three degrees that took place fifty-five million years ago, some mammals shrank by up to a third, while insects like beetles, ants, and bees shrank by three-quarters.
*25 The average consumption of both red meat and poultry in 1960 was 75.3 kilograms, in 2017 it was projected at 98.8.
*26 Twenty percent of Pacific Islanders living into Tonga and Tuvalu are classified as obese, and even North Korea has seen a gain of 1 percent.
*27 The first published observations using a microscope were in Galileo’s Apiarium in 1625. He first observed the flea with a microscope in 1624.
*28 There are three people associated with the invention of the telescope as two patents were filed within weeks of each other. Zacharias Janssen is often also cited as an inventor. Early telescopes were very simple, they were made of two pieces of glass held apart to magnify distant objects.
*29 Our ability to detect light is so powerful, that scientists recently discovered that, up close, we can even detect the faintest glimmer from the light of a single photon.
*30 The ancient Mizar test has been found to be the modern tested equivalent of 20/20 acuity.
*31 Planets were not differentiated from stars, other than the fact that they seemed to “wander.”
*32 The seven axioms of heliocentrism are: “(1) There is no one center in the universe; (2) The Earth’s center is not the center of the universe; (3) The center of the universe is near the sun; (4) The distance from the Earth to the sun is imperceptible compared with the distance to the stars; (5) The rotation of the Earth accounts for the apparent daily rotation of the stars; (6) The apparent annual cycle of movements of the sun is caused by the Earth revolving round it. (7) The apparent retrograde motion of the planets is caused by the motion of the Earth from which one observes.”
*33 Using new techniques, researchers have re-imaged the data and calculated that some galaxies may be nearly twice as big as previously thought.
*34 “The faintest galaxies are one ten-billionth the brightness of what the human eye can see.”
*35 The number in football fields is just as mind-numbing and hard to fathom: 60,720,000 football fields.
*36 The smallest unit we can see with an electron microscope is an angstrom, which is 1 x 10-10
*37 Galileo was so controversial it took 350 years for the Catholic Church to officially concede, in 1992, that he and Copernicus were right.
2
MIND BOMB
It has never occurred to me before, but this is truly how it is: all of us on earth walk constantly over a seething, scarlet sea of flame, hidden below, in the belly of the earth. We never think of it. But what if the thin crust under our feet should turn into glass and we should suddenly see…I became glass. I saw—within myself.
—YEVGENY ZAMYATIN
THE DETECTIVES AT THE SCENE didn’t have much to go on. The scene was grisly. Lying on the floor of the apartment were two elderly women: one was found with her head beneath a chair, the other wrapped in a carpet. They took fingernail clippings as well as hair and skin samples from the deceased. Both women were mummified.
The Viennese police discovered the sisters’ bodies in 1992. They had been dead for years. Neighbours hadn’t missed them, as the women were recluses. Instead, many had assumed that they had simply packed up and moved away. The city bankers, however, were more curious than the neighbours, especially as the sisters were wealthy. So, when their accounts fell dormant, questions began to arise, and eventually the police were sent to investigate.
News of the women’s demise soon spread to the insurance companies. And while foul play was not suspected, the insurers still needed to know which sister died first, as the company holding the policy for the inheritor had a large amount of money to gain. For the forensics team, this was a mystery, and they turned to physicists at the University of Vienna for help. To crack the case, the scientists would develop a new tool with the ability to “see” the body in a brand-new way: a kind of clock, one with the power to pinpoint their time of death.
To explain how the clock works, we must first go in time back to 1763. If you’d been walking along the cobblestone streets of Harwich, you might have heard a couple of brilliant minds deep in conversation one day. Samuel Johnson and James Boswell were debating the ideas of a famed Irish philosopher named George Berkeley. Berkeley’s argument was quite radical for its time. He believed that we cannot know things as they truly are; instead, what we know about the world is based on our sensory impressions of things. Put another way, for Berkeley, our perceptions make things appear “real” to us; that is, a table or a chair exists only insofar as it can be perceived, meaning that these objects exist only in our minds. What troubled people back then, and continues to trouble us now, was that since we can know only the world that exists in our minds, how do we know for certain that the material world is even really there?
It seems an impossible riddle, but Johnson was of the belief that Berkeley’s argument could be proven wrong, in a rather simple manner. As the story goes, he confronted the philosophical problem with a decidedly non-philosophical solution. How would he refute Berkeley’s assertion? Boswell looked on as Johnson kicked a large stone, yelling, “I refute it THUS.”
It was in this way that Johnson gave to the history of philosophy a new fallacy: the argumentum ad lapidem, or “appeal to the stone.” Because, of course, he hadn’t refuted Berkeley at all. The pain in Johnson’s toe was exactly what Berkeley would have predicted: a pain that was only real because it had been created by his mind.
Today, this same question of external reality is being tackled not only by philosophers but also by scientists. Is there a world “out there,” or does it require a consciousness for it to be perceived? What we see is certainly not what objectively exists. Instead, what we see is based on our particular human sensory machinery. As Robert Lanza and Bob Berman write in Biocentrism, a yellow, flickering candle flame, for instance, cannot be perceived without us:
The flame is…merely a hot gas. Like any source of light, it emits photons or tiny packets of waves of electromagnetic energy…these invisible electromagnetic waves strike a human retina, and if (and only if) the waves each happen to measure between 400 and 700 nanometres in length from crest to crest, then their energy is just right to deliver a stimulus to the 8 million cone-shaped cells in the retina. Each in turn sends an electrical pulse to a neighbour neuron, and on up the line this goes, at 250 mph, until it reaches the warm, wet occipital lobe of the brain, in the back of the head. There a cascading complex of neurons fire from the incoming stimuli, and we subjectively perceive this experience as a yellow brightness occurring in a place we have been conditioned to call “the external world.”
The same thing holds true for hard physical objects, like rocks. There is nothing solid about a rock. It is made up of a fizz of atoms and flickering subatomic particles, the bulk of which is empty space. What Johnson perceived when he kicked the rock that day was a sensation of pressure as the negatively charged electrons in the outer shell of the rock repelled the negatively charged electrons that made up the outer shell of his shoe. There was no solid contact; it was just pressure translated by his brain as sensation. From the nerves in his toe, all the way up his spinal cord and into his brain, this was how Johnson came to perceive that he kicked a stone. To date, no one has effectively refuted George Berkeley. Even Albert Einstein could not definitively prove that reality exists. In a 1955 letter he wrote, “It is basic for physics that one assumes a real world existing independently from any act of perception. But this we do not know [emphasis in original].”
While we can’t say for certain whether reality
exists independently of an observer, what we do know is that the physical world is far stranger than what our eyes perceive. For one thing, we commonly think of our bodies as separate and distinct from the external world, but modern science tells us that there is no “out there”; indeed, there is no place where your body ends and the world begins.
* * *
—
IF YOU KNOW HOW TO SEE, you can make an entire mountain disappear. That is exactly what a team of scientists did in the Gifu prefecture of Japan. Here, Mount Ikeno rises over the landscape. With snow-capped peaks and a river winding past its base, it looks like the backdrop of a postcard.
But hidden within, a mile beneath the summit, is a high-tech lab that would rival a villain’s lair in a James Bond movie. Inside this former zinc mine, technicians in hooded white coveralls monitor a thirteen-storey-tall steel tank filled with fifty thousand metric tons of ultra-pure water. This is the Super-Kamiokande, or Super-K, neutrino observatory, a massive underground facility built to detect some of the smallest known subatomic particles in the universe. To “see” these invisible particles, the observatory’s ceiling and walls are lined with eleven thousand shiny hand-blown glass bulbs, called photomultiplier tubes, built to pick up tiny flashes of neutrino light.
It was here, buried deep in the heart of the mountain, that this $100-million “camera” took the most extraordinary picture of the sun. The image is pixelated but instantly familiar: a white-hot core, ringed by bright yellow, and flaring out into orange and waves of red. But what’s puzzling is this: how could an image of the sun be taken from deep inside a mountain with no windows to let the light in? The answer lies in what the Super-K is looking for. While a regular camera captures photons, or particles of light, the Super-K captures and images a different kind of particle. It is looking for neutrinos: particles so tiny and fast moving they can zip right through even the densest of matter.
