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“There’s a lot of room at the bottom.” This was proclaimed by physicist Richard Feynman in 1959, announcing the new field of nanophysics, the study of the very, very small.
Feynman’s maxim continued to run through my head last week after the Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded to three scientists who discovered how to produce bursts of laser light just a millionth of a billionth of a second long, fast enough to follow the movements of electrons in a chemical reaction.
The next day, the Nobel Prize in Chemistry went to three scientists who learned how to assemble atoms into quantum dots, groups so small that they are considered to have no dimension.
The awards served as a reminder of how divorced humans are from the scale at which nature’s most important processes unfold.
I’ve spent much of my career writing about large-scale things, particularly the cosmos, where time is measured in centuries and distance in light years, with each light year spanning 6 trillion miles. The life cycles of stars are measured in millions or billions of years. According to some estimates, black holes can remain there, consuming voraciously, for a googol: 10^100 years.
Atoms, however, are measured in fractions of a nanometer, approximately three millionths of an inch. According to my colleague Carl ZimmerThere are billions of billions of atoms in my body, grouped into about 37 trillion cells that do all the work of keeping me alive and conscious.
And chemical reactions are measured in attoseconds; It is safe, although complicated, to say that up to a million trillion chemical reactions could occur every second in each of the 37 trillion cells that I am. To say “I contain multitudes” is a gross understatement.
The numbers make me dizzy and tired. How is it possible to keep track of so many things happening so quickly and everything being subject to quantum mechanics, the internal rules of the extremely small, according to which anything can be anywhere until it is measured?
Quantum accidents happen all the time. Why haven’t I simply vanished into a quantum effervescence like Schrodinger’s cat, alive and dead at the same time? I can only conclude that there is security and stability in the astronomical numbers that make us up. Perhaps big numbers are a bulwark against quantum uncertainty. So I’m here, I think.
We humans are so caught in the middle of the cosmic scales: with an average height, one septillionth (10^-24) the size of the universe and with an average lifespan of an octillion attoseconds. And an attosecond is an eternity compared to the lifetime of the elusive Higgs boson, a subatomic particle that exists for a thousandth of an attosecond before decaying.
According to astrophysicists, one of the most exciting and fundamental events in the universe, known simply as inflation, took only one hundredth of a kectosecond (10^-32 of a second) after time began to shape spacetime and particles. and forces that would inhabit it.
As Dr. Feynman pointed out, there are still shorter scales of time and distance to go before we reach the ultimate limits imposed by quantum physics: the Planck length, 10^-33 of a centimeter, and the Planck time, 10^-43 of a centimeter. one second. Both are named after the German physicist Max Planck, who made the breakthrough that led to quantum mechanics.
With more energy, money, and ingenuity, science could complete the journey through inner space to these limits, even as we reach the stars. The world beneath and within our fingernails can still be as exciting and dramatic as the view that unfolds above us each night.