“There’s plenty of room down there.” So declared physicist Richard Feynman in 1959, heralding a new field in nanophysics: the study of very small things.
Feynman’s quote stuck with me last week after the Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded to three scientists who figured out how to produce bursts of laser light that are only a millionth of a trillionth of a second long, fast enough to track the movements of laser light. Electrons in a chemical reaction.
The next day, the Nobel Prize in Chemistry went to three scientists who had learned how to assemble atoms into quantum dots, clumps so small that they are considered completely dimensionless.
The awards were a reminder of how disconnected we humans are from the scale at which nature’s most important processes unfold.
I’ve spent much of my career writing about things on a larger scale, particularly the universe, where time is measured in centuries and distance in light-years, and where each light-year spans 6 trillion miles. The life cycles of stars are measured in millions or billions of years. By some estimates, black holes may be around, consuming voraciously, for 10^100 years.
However, atoms are measured in fractions of a nanometer, which is about three millionths of an inch. According to my colleague Carl ZimmerThere are a billion billion billion atoms in my body, grouped into about 37 trillion cells that do all the work to keep me alive and conscious.
Chemical reactions are measured in totoseconds; It is safe, but risky, to say that there may be as many as a million trillion chemical reactions occurring every second in each of the 37 trillion cells that are me. To say “I contain multitudes” is a gross understatement.
Numbers make me dizzy and tired. How can you keep track of so much that’s happening so quickly, all governed by quantum mechanics, the house rules for very small things, by which anything can be anywhere until you measure it?
Quantum accidents happen all the time. Why didn’t I simply disappear in a quantum frenzy like Schrödinger’s cat, dead and alive at the same time? I can only conclude that there is safety and stability in the astrological numbers that make us up. Perhaps large numbers are a bulwark against quantitative uncertainty. So here I am – I guess.
We humans are stuck pretty much in the middle of the cosmic scales — at the average height, which is a hundredth of a septillionth (10^-24) of the size of the observable universe, and with typical lifespans of a few octillion attoseconds. 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 dramatic and fundamental events in the universe, known as inflation, took only a hundredth of a quiktosecond (10^-32 of a second) after time began to shape spacetime and the particles and forces that would inhabit it.
As Dr. Feynman pointed out, there are still shorter scales of time and distance before we reach the final limits imposed by quantum physics: the Planck length, 10^-33 centimeters, and the Planck time, 10^-43 centimeters per second. Both are named after German physicist Max Planck, who made the breakthrough that led to quantum mechanics.
With more energy, money, and creativity, science might continue the journey through inner space to these limits, even when we reach the stars. The world beneath and within our fingernails can be as exciting and thrilling as the spectacle that unfolds above us each night.
