

Scale of the Universe - btilly
http://primaxstudio.com/stuff/scale_of_universe/

======
goodside
As pointed out by others, the largest scales on this animation are completely
wrong. The figure given for the Observable Universe, 14 billion light years,
is actually only half of the distance between us and the HUDF.YD3 galaxy. The
figure given for the total size of the Universe is actually the estimated size
of the Observable Universe: 93 billion light years. The size of the Universe
itself is not known with any certainty.

If you're wondering to yourself how anything can be further away than (age of
Universe) * (speed of light), read up on comoving distance and the metric
expansion of spacetime. I wrote a fairly lengthy series of comments on this
six months ago: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1317907>

~~~
kokofoo
I'm wondering what you think about Wun-Yi Shu Universe
(<http://byrev.org/tech/wun-yi-shu-universe/>). I saw a post about his paper
here on HN a while ago.

~~~
goodside
Without looking too hard at it, this seems to be nonsense. Shu pulls
parameters out of the air all over the place and makes wild philosophical
claims about the nature of time without explanation. He selectively ignores
basic physics, and makes up nonstandard formulas for various quantities
whenever they're needed.

Further, he repeatedly draws conclusions that, if proven, would win him a
Nobel Prize. The biggest is that black holes can't exist. Others include
having solved both the flatness problem and the horizon problem and ruling out
the only known explanation of the CMBR without replacing it with anything
else.

But, rather than take my word for it, you should just apply the Baez Index:
<http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/crackpot.html>

------
hugh3
_The man who invented the Total Perspective Vortex did so basically in order
to annoy his wife.

Trin Tragula--for that was his name--was a dreamer, a thinker, a speculative
philosopher or, as his wife would have it, an idiot.

And she would nag him incessantly about the utterly inordinate amount of time
he spent staring out into space, or mulling over the mechanics of safety pins,
or doing spectrographic analyses of pieces of fairy cake.

"Have some sense of proportion!" she would say, sometimes as often as thirty-
eight times in a single day.

And so he built the Total Perspective Vortex--just to show her.

And into one end, he plugged the whole of reality as extrapolated from a piece
of fairy cake, and into the other, he plugged his wife: so that when he turned
it on she saw in one instant the whole infinity of creation and herself in
relation to it.

To Trin Tragula's horror, the shock completely annihilated her brain, but to
his satisfaction he realized that he had proved conclusively that if life is
going to exist in a Universe of this size, then one thing it cannot afford to
have is a sense of proportion._

~~~
js2
I really hope no HN reader misses the reference, but:

    
    
      -- Douglas Adams, _The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy_

~~~
CallMeV
I think he'd have appreciated this site.

------
treeface
Every time this toy shows up, I try to remind people that it doesn't have the
grandest scale right.

First, the observable universe. From WP:

 _The comoving distance from Earth to the edge of the observable universe is
about 14 billion parsecs (46.5 billion light-years) in any direction. The
visible universe is thus a sphere with a diameter of about 28 billion parsecs
(about 93 billion light-years). Assuming that space is roughly flat, this size
corresponds to a comoving volume of about 3×10^80 cubic meters. This is
equivalent to a volume of about 41 decillion cubic light-years short scale
(4.1 × 10^34 cubic light years)._

Now for the whole universe:

 _According to the theory of cosmic inflation and its founder, Alan Guth, if
it is assumed that inflation began about 10^-37 seconds after the Big Bang,
then with the plausible assumption that the size of the Universe at this time
was approximately equal to the speed of light times its age, that would
suggest that at present the entire Universe's size is at least 10^23 times
larger than the size of the observable Universe._

~~~
9ec4c12949a4f3
Ah, but in the earliest part of the big bang, time didn't exist. Now what?

~~~
cryptoz
You are incorrect. There is no concept of time or space "before" the Big Bang;
I say "before" in quotes because there is no "before" the Big Bang.

In the earliest part of the Big Bang time did exist. The Big Bang created
time.

~~~
9ec4c12949a4f3
Simple question here, when did I ever say before?

Edit:

In the early universe, before the plank epoch when we had particles of plank
length or less, you know, things with a schwarzschild radius? The entire
universe made of things that are black holes, nothing but black holes? Those
time-ending particles that disappeared in their own hawking radiation? The
first early 10^−43 seconds, where time didn't actually exist? Those were the
good old days.

~~~
hugh3
_The first early 10^−43 seconds, where time didn't actually exist?_

If time didn't exist, then how did the universe know when those 10^-43 seconds
were up?

Seriously, I think this discussion is proceeding at a level which probably
shouldn't be attempted by non-cosmologists. We all probably have a bunch of
misconceptions we've picked up from popularizations about the Big Bang, and
would only embarrass ourselves if any cosmologists happen to show up.

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jeromec
Darn American measuring system. I wish I wasn't metric system handicapped...
After slowly and sensibly dragging from small to large, it's cool to whip
rapidly too! :)

Edit: Uh oh, I seem to have angered the downvote police. Sorry, uh... yay
fractions?

~~~
jessriedel
At these scales, the difference between meters and feet (or really, between cm
and miles) is insignificant.

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ddlatham
Interesting that we seem to fall about in the middle.

Or perhaps that suggests we've only been able to observe so far in either
direction.

~~~
rokamic
Because humans can only observe the universe from Earth's point of view, our
perception is that we are in the middle of the cosmos. Yet we are only in the
middle of what we can observe from our point of view at any angle. As you
said, we can only observe so far in either direction or any direction as it
were.

~~~
ddlatham
I was referring to the middle of the scale, rather than the middle of the
universe.

~~~
rokamic
Ah, thank you for clarity. The concept still applies I think.

------
petercooper
_We're probably not in the center of the universe._

From having listened to Dr Pamela Gay on Astronomy Cast for the last few
years, I thought the general line of thinking now was that there is no center
(or if there is, it's "everywhere") due to way it loops around on itself.

~~~
sp332
There is no "general thinking" because no one's measured the edge of the
universe to see what it's like. And certainly no one has seen the universe
"wrap" around itself. In the absence of evidence, everyone just picks the
model that looks best to them on paper.

------
js2
Previously submitted as <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1084700>

------
georgecmu
At the smallest scale it claims: _Plank's length -- any length shorter makes
no physical sense_

Is this actually true? According to wikipedia
(<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planck_length>): _The physical significance of
the Planck length, if any, is not yet known._

------
muon
A video which gives perspective of distance, in appreciable way. The powers of
ten
[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0fKBhvDjuy0&feature=playe...](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0fKBhvDjuy0&feature=player_embedded)

------
unwind
I found it incredibly annoying that the numbers are formatted with the power
of ten magnitude first, and the actual measurement last.

So, 3 cm is formatted as 10^-2 * 3 m, rather than the (in my opinion, correct)
3 * 10^-2 m. The power of ten is what is given a shorthand as "centi" in "cm",
so it just disrupts it totally when they're swapped.

I realize the point is probably to make the order of magnitude more important
than the actual value ("cm" is more interesting than "3 cm"), to get a sense
of scale. Still, I found it ugly and hard to read.

------
gokhan
Another one with much limited scope:

<http://learn.genetics.utah.edu/content/begin/cells/scale/>

------
SkyMarshal
Fascinating how large the gap is from Neutrinos to Quantum Foam/Strings. I
can't help but wonder if it's filled with stuff we don't yet know about.

Also, a Giant Earthworm that's the length of a small car? What what what?

Really great data viz, thanks for posting it.

------
rokamic
Absolutely fantastic and soothing. My thoughts are made of such things, this
example helps to sooth my mind.

A technical question: How was relative scale so efficiently kept between all
those objects?

------
davnola
Isn't it odd that there is _no_ physical structure between 10^-35 (Planck
length) and 10^-24 (neutrino)?

That's a massive gap compared to scales larger than the neutrino. Is there are
reason?

~~~
photon_off
They may not have been discovered yet. Things on this scale would be
incredibly difficult to detect.

------
alexyoung
I want to know what's hiding between 0.1 yoctometers and Planck length, it
seems like a big blank according to the Flash app thing...

~~~
gbhn
Yeah, we have no instruments to really get to that scale. Probably won't for
some time, either.

------
gacba
Well done! Edutainment at its finest. You should publish that for physics
teachers.

------
maeon3
there might be entire civilizations of life forms billions of years ahead of
us technology wise inside the atoms that make up the particles in the air we
breath. Our entire universe may be an atom that makes up a single blob unit of
a cell inside an entity that is larger than our known universe.

It would make an interesting sci-fi movie, to finally make contact with an
advanced race that lives inside an electron.

~~~
jordanlev
Men In Black? (although I guess contact wasn't actually made, unless you count
a game of marbles)

------
pencil
too good..i've added it to my favorites.

------
rblion
We are so small yet think so big. We are interesting creatures...a bit mad
though.

~~~
CallMeV
Only /a bit/ mad?

------
evanw
The only way this could've been better is if a large, screaming face appeared
at the smallest scale.

