August
29, 2017 Tuesday
Bedtime
Story
Stupefying Link Between the Vastness of the Universe and Our Existence
I
shall yet again continue with the extract from “Just Six Numbers” and end it
tonight.
“A
universe that didn’t involve large numbers could never evolve a complex
hierarchy of structures: it would be dull, and certainly not habitable.
And
there must be long time spans as well.
Process
in an atom may take a millionth of a billionth of a second to be completed;
within the central nucleus of each atom, events are even faster.
The
complex processes that transform an embryo into blood, bone and flesh involve a
succession of cell divisions, coupled with differentiation, each involving
thousands of intricately orchestrated regroupings and replications of
molecules; this activity never ceases as long as we eat and breathe.
And
our life is just one generation in humankind’s evolution, an episode that is
itself just one stage in the emergence of the totality of life.
The
tremendous time spans involved in evolution offer a new perspective on the
question ‘Why is our universe so big?’
The
emergence of human life here on Earth has taken 4.5 billion years.
Even
before our Sun and its planets could form, earlier stars must have transmuted
pristine hydrogen into carbon, oxygen and other atoms of the periodic table.
This
has taken about ten billion years.
The
size of the observable universe is, roughly, the distance travelled by light
since the Big Bang, and so present visible universe must be around ten-billion
light-years across.
This
is a startling conclusion.
The
very hugeness of our universe, which seems at first to signify how unimportant
we are in the cosmic scheme, is actually entailed (entail = necessitate,
require) by our existence!
This
is not to say that there couldn’t have been a smaller universe, only that we
could not have existed in it.
The
expanse of the cosmic space is not an extravagant superfluity; it’s a
consequence of the prolonged chain of events, extending back before our Solar
System formed, that preceded our arrival on the scene.
This
may seem a regression to an ancient ‘anthropocentric’ perspective – something
that was shattered by Copernicus’s revelation that the Earth moves around the
Sun rather than vice versa.”
But
we shouldn’t take Copernican modesty (sometimes called the ‘principle of
mediocrity’) too far.
Creatures
like us require special conditions to have evolved, so our perspective is bound
to be in some sense atypical.
The
vastness of our universe shouldn’t surprise us, even though we may still seek a
deeper explanation for its distinctive features.”
I
end the extract here.
Stay tuned to the voice of an average story storytelling
chimpanzee or login at http://panarrans.blogspot.com
Good night mon ami and my fellow cousin ape.
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Another great educator and a teacher that I am aware of is
Professor Subhashish Chattopadhyay in Bangalore, India.
While I narrate stories, Professor Subhashish an electronic
engineer and a former professor at BARC, does and teaches real mathematics and
physics.
He started the participation of Indian students at the
International Physics Olympiad.
Do visit him here:
All his books can be downloaded for free through this link:
For edutainment and English education of your children, I
recommend this large collection of Halloween Songs for Kids:
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