by Caleb Scharf
The mathematical relationship between basal metabolic rate and organism mass is pretty remarkable. See, for example, Geoffrey B. West et al., “A General Model for the Origin of Allometric Scaling Laws in Biology,” Science 276 (1997): 122–26.
Scaling laws and human cities are also amazing. See Geoffrey West’s lovely essay on this, “Scaling: The Surprising Mathematics of Life and Civilization,” https://medium.com/sfi-30-foundations-frontiers/scaling-the-surprising-mathematics-of-life-and-civilization-49ee18640a8.
Swarms and flocks are fascinating, and a number of researchers study these to try to learn about the emergence of complex phenomena from simple rules, and also about how organisms learn and adapt. The research area is often called “swarm behavior” or “swarm dynamics.” It lends itself to examination through software simulations and robotics.
The ant colony’s “shortest path” optimization has spawned a small field of research, generating computational/algorithmic approaches to solving hard problems that can be represented as graphs—where a shortest path through is the solution. This literally all began by studying ants. See, for example, J. L. Deneubourg et al., “Probabilistic Behaviour in Ants: A Strategy of Errors?,” Journal of Theoretical Biology 105 (1983): 259–71.
I mention entropy at the end of this chapter. Entropy is worthy of an entire book in itself. A concept close to the core of modern physics, it is quite hard to grasp and is still not fully understood.
8. The Undergrowth
There were several options for how to handle this chapter. One was to just plunge ahead and ignore the physical impossibility of “observing” these scales the same way that we’ve observed the larger ones. Instead, I chose to confront the bizarreness of these scales head-on and to try to show the transition to the atomic—setting the stage for the following chapters too.
The data on DNA lengths in the infographic is perhaps the most shocking thing in this chapter (well, almost as shocking as the reveal of the quantum world). The numbers are robust: if you could lay out a single strand of human DNA (over three billion nucleotides in size) in an untwisted, uncurled state, it’d be a 1.8-meter-long invisible thread. All the other numbers flow from this, once you include an estimate of approximately 40 trillion cells in a human body (a more recent and conservative estimate than the 100 trillion that often gets quoted). The total length of all human DNA is crazy, I know, but that’s what you get.
Not all bacteria look alike. We’ve chosen one with a tail and a “pill-like” shape because it’s perhaps more visually appealing. There is actually a wide range of single-cell morphologies.
Microbes are the real rulers of our planet. They’re also the real rulers of us. If you want to upset yourself (in a great way), read Ed Yong’s I Contain Multitudes: The Microbes Within Us and a Grander View of Life (New York: HarperCollins, 2016).
Except, if microbes are the real rulers, what are viruses? It’s possible that viruses are every bit as much “in charge” as the organisms above them; we just have a hard time characterizing viruses as “alive.” Another great popular account is Carl Zimmer’s A Planet of Viruses (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011).
Someone should write a lay reader’s account of the ribosome—perhaps they have, but I’ve not come across a good one. A ribosome in our cells is more than fifty proteins plus RNA. It’s a crazy thing. Nick Hud at Georgia Tech gave me a crash course one sweltering day in Atlanta a few years ago, so here’s a good reference, including his research group: Anton S. Petrov et al., “History of the Ribosome and the Origin of Translation,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 112, no. 50 (2015): 15396–401.
I mention the electrical stickiness of things at small scales. It’s a reminder that chemistry is all about electromagnetism. Even though electromagnetism is actually mediated by the exchange of photons, it’s not like you can “see” these photons in the way you do on human scales.
Getting diffracted as you pass through a doorway is an old physics trope. I’ve heard jokes told in academia about how you can use this to escape a tiger that’s chasing you. Jump into a hut and stand in the place where the diffraction pattern of the tiger is at a minimum (see the next chapter too). This kind of tale goes back to the physicist George Gamow’s charming educational stories of Mr. Tompkins, such as Mr. Tompkins in Wonderland, published in 1940; a modern collection is Mr. Tompkins in Paperback (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1993, 2012). Tompkins’s journeys include going inside the atom.
To figure out how much you can actually diffract in going through a normal-size doorway as a normal-size human, you must first work out your de Broglie wavelength and use de Broglie’s equation, which allows you to compute the velocity (or momentum) you need to diffract by some noticeable amount. Turns out you have to be going really, really slowly—less than 10−34 meters a second—so it would actually take you trillions of times longer than the age of the universe to get across the threshold.
I’m often asked whether nature could use elements other than carbon to make life. It’s possible, but carbon really does hit the mark, for the reasons I give in the text. Its combination of bond formation, reactivity, and stability is pretty special.
Coming up with the infographic of the life of a carbon atom was fun but challenging, because there are simply so many pathways any single carbon atom in your body could have taken. In the last steps I decided to have us ingest the carbon in “organic matter” stuck to the potato. Otherwise it would have to go through another cycle in the atmosphere before incorporating into a plant.
Understanding the production of carbon by stars was one of the triumphs of twentieth-century astrophysics and nuclear physics. But it also leads to some intriguing discussions on the “fine-tuning” of the cosmos. A rather fun, but technical, recent paper takes this all a bit further: Fred C. Adams and Evan Grohs, “Stellar Helium Burning in Other Universes: A Solution to the Triple Alpha Fine-Tuning Problem,” https://arxiv.org/abs/1608.04690.
Anthropic arguments are indeed good fodder for discussion. You can find many sources to delve into on this topic (including my earlier books). A balanced and modern one is Martin Rees’s Just Six Numbers: The Deep Forces That Shape the Universe (New York: Basic Books, 2000).
9. The Emptiness of Matter
Here I’m back complaining about how empty the cosmos is—just like in Chapter 2. It is astonishing how little space is really occupied by the matter of an atom—although of course the electrons do occupy all the space in an atom, they only do so probabilistically.
The nature of quantum mechanics, and its description of the atomic and subatomic world, is very challenging to convey. Here I decided to try to be reasonably honest. Quantum mechanics is an incredibly successful framework—yet it’s also not clear what the best model is for its underlying properties. We thought about illustrating the Schrödinger’s Cat experiment in different interpretations, but that proved not to allow a clear enough distinction. The two-slit, or double-slit, experiment hit the mark.
The de Broglie–Bohm interpretation seems to be getting a bit more press these days. In part this is because of some intriguing experimental work. See Dylan H. Mahler et al., “Experimental Nonlocal and Surreal Bohmian Trajectories,” Science Advances 2, no. 2 (2016): e1501466.
The idea that in a many-worlds interpretation the electrons passing through a double-slit experiment get “buffeted” by those in parallel realities comes from some recent proposals. Here the parallel realities are “classical” in the sense that quantum effects arise solely because of the interaction of these other worlds—if you took away the other realities you’d be left with a classical non-quantum world (which would presumably also mean the end of us all). See Michael J. W. Hall et al., “Quantum Phenomena Modeled by Interactions between Many Classical Worlds,” Physical Review X 4, no. 4 (2014): 041013.
Entanglement and non-locality are a beast to get your head around. I recommend George Musser’s excellent Spooky Action at a Distance: The Phenomen
on That Reimagines Space and Time—and What It Means for Black Holes, the Big Bang, and Theories of Everything (New York: Scientific American / Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2016).
I mention isotopes because it intrigues me that at what is, to us, such a fundamental level (atomic nuclei), nature is still kind of messy. These nuclei are far from elegant. Yet at the same time, isotopes are so very useful for us in figuring out the workings of the cosmos. I can’t resist citing the following paper: L. G. Santesteban et al., “Application of the Measurement of the Natural Abundance of Stable Isotopes in Viticulture: A Review,” Australian Journal of Grape and Wine Research 21, no. 2 (2015): 157–67. Bet that’s the first time this journal has been cited in a book like this.
How do you make super-heavy nuclei like oganesson (ununoctium)? You can bash other heavy nuclei into each other in the hope that something new sticks—basically. As that heavy nucleus undergoes radioactive decay (typically very quickly), you can look for the decay products and figure out what was formed.
I decided not to go very deep into particle physics in this chapter, beyond introducing quarks and gluons and illustrating the particle families. There are lots of good popular accounts of this science, going back over many decades—and I wanted to keep the sense of descent going. We can catch fleeting glimpses along the way of the rich variety of structures at this scale, but we must plunge on.
This statement on incomprehensibility is indeed Einstein’s sentiment, but he didn’t use exactly these words. The original source, where the wording is somewhat different (“One may say ‘the eternal mystery of the world is its comprehensibility’ ”), is Albert Einstein, “Physics and Reality,” 1936, reprinted in Einstein, Ideas and Opinions (New York: Crown, 1954, 1982).
10. It’s Full of … Fields
We faced two choices here: depict nineteen orders of magnitude of unknown textures, seething virtual particles, the same, same stuff at all these scales, or skip most of it. I think we made the right decision. But it wasn’t taken lightly. We just assume it’s kind of boring across these tiny scales, but we don’t really know.
Shifting the emphasis from “particle and wave” to “field and quanta” is, I think, important. It serves to introduce us to the mathematical machinery that modern physics uses, but it also (I hope) helps give a sense that we’re approaching the ultimate, rock-bottom fundamentals of the cosmos.
A good, classic read is Richard P. Feynman’s QED: The Strange Theory of Light and Matter (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986), as well as his other books and lecture notes.
How to depict the final scale—Planck’s 10−35 meters—was quite a challenge. To be honest, we could have done almost anything here and it would be valid. In the end, I like the texture and depth of our visual—it’s restrained, but it makes your eyes hurt just a little.
The idea of “quantum foam” apparently arose in the mind of the physicist John Wheeler in the course of discussions with his colleague Charles Misner in the mid-1950s, or so he claimed: John Archibald Wheeler with Kenneth Ford, Geons, Black Holes, and Quantum Foam: A Life in Physics (New York: W. W. Norton, 1998). Work that may be able to test for signs of quantum foam includes Fermilab’s Muon g-2 experiment. For string theory and other arcana of ultra-physics, readable sources include Brian Greene’s The Elegant Universe: Superstrings, Hidden Dimensions, and the Quest for the Ultimate Theory (New York: W. W. Norton, 1999, 2003).
The final infographic here is a way of depicting the layers of “translation” that we apply to understanding the universe around us, starting with pure mathematics and moving inward to physics. The equations on this graphic are just a few of those we could have chosen—they’re an attempt to cherry-pick the most interesting. In that sense they reflect the whole idea of this book: it’s a big universe, with lots of fun trips; we’ve just chosen one of those journeys.
In the final text here I (again) mention computers. I’m really alluding to artificial intelligence. The latest deep-learning systems (with tens of “hidden layers” of software neural nets) are doing something we’ve never seen before in computation. It’s a little scary, a lot exhilarating. We could be at the tipping point where our minds are extended outside their biological confines. It’s going to be an interesting future.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The original idea for this book grew from early conversations with Deirdre Mullane of Mullane Literary and Amanda Moon at Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Without their enthusiasm, and a great deal of their patience, this project wouldn’t have got past the first centimeter in scale.
Those initial rounds of lunch-fueled cogitation led us to focus on the relationship of the natural world with itself—in scale, time, and energy. As we added ideas like complexity, emergence, and chaos, the vision of the book crystallized. To get from almost everything to nearly nothing has been a fun trip in its own right. I’ve had the very great privilege of working with Ron Miller and his supreme illustration skills and imagination, as well as the graphic prowess of Samuel and Juan Velasco of 5W Infographics. All of you have shown me what it’s like to work with real professionals, time and time again. And in that same vein I’d like to thank all the other members of the FSG team, especially Jonathan Lippincott and Scott Borchert. A special shout-out also goes to Annie Gottlieb, whose copyediting skills have made innumerable improvements to the text.
Some of this book took shape during long flights between New York and Tokyo, and in many tranquil moments in Japan. I’d like to express my gratitude to all the scientists and staff at the Earth-Life Science Institute at the Tokyo Institute of Technology for throwing fuel onto the fires of inspiration at many points. A special thank-you goes to Piet Hut for planting the seeds for all of that to happen, and for what I expect to be future crops.
To many other friends and colleagues, including Mary Voytek, Frits Paerels, David Helfand, Amber Miller, Michael Way, Nelson Rivera, Daniel Savin, Arlin Crotts, Ayako Fukui, Windell Williams, Abigail and Lewis Wendell, Eric Gotthelf, and Fernando Camilo, thank you for all your support and encouragement.
Finally, as always, my home team: Bonnie, Laila, Amelia, and Marina, thanks for putting up with all of this.
—Caleb Scharf
New York, 2016
I’ve always been fascinated by the very, very large and the very, very small. The first probably came from the interest in astronomy and space travel I’ve had pretty much all my life. The latter might come from having seen The Incredible Shrinking Man when it was first released in theaters (I refuse to look up the year that happened)—but I may have wanted to see the movie because I had already read a short story by Henry Hasse called “He Who Shrank,” which turned the whole idea of macro- and microverses upside down. I also remember a book I devoured in grade school called The Thirteen Steps to the Atom that took me on a step-by-step photographic journey from my familiar world to the almost infinitely small. I discovered the classic Cosmic View around the same time—and still have my original copy. I remember when Charles and Ray Eames’s Powers of Ten came out, in 1977; I must have watched it a dozen times then and I don’t know how many times since. So when I was offered the chance to illustrate this book, I jumped at it, if for no other reason than that it presented an immense challenge. I had never done anything like it before. No problem with the zoom from the edge of the universe to Earth—I was on familiar territory there—but as the book dove ever deeper into the very small, I was exploring new subjects, ideas, and techniques. An especial challenge was having to illustrate things that literally could not be seen, or even measured, for that matter … things that in many cases barely had any reality at all.
It also gave me a chance to work again with Amanda Moon, and to work for the first time with Caleb Scharf, whose writing I absolutely couldn’t admire more. All to say nothing of the pleasure of associating with the rest of the book’s wonderful team: Scott Borchert and Jonathan Lippincott. And, as always, a grateful tip of the hat to the ever-patient Judith Miller.
—Ron Miller
South Boston, Virginia, 2016
A Note About the Author, Illustrator, and Infographics
A Note About the Author
Caleb Scharf is the award-winning author of The Copernicus Complex and Gravity’s Engines, and the director of the Columbia Astrobiology Center. He has written for The New Yorker, The New York Times, Scientific American, Nautilus, and Nature, among other publications. He lives in New York City. Follow him on Twitter at @caleb_scharf or sign up for email updates here.
A Note About the Illustrator
Ron Miller is an award-winning illustrator and author whose work has appeared in National Geographic, Scientific American, the bestselling app Journey to the Exoplanets, and editions of 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, Journey to the Center of the Earth, and many other books. He served as art director for the National Air and Space Museum’s Albert Einstein Planetarium. He lives in Virginia. Visit his website at www.black-cat-studios.com.
A Note About the Infographics
5W Infographics is an award-winning design and consulting company that specializes in infographics, data visualization, and information-driven visual projects. It was founded by Juan Velasco and Samuel Velasco in 2001. Juan was art director of National Geographic from 2008 to 2014 and was previously the graphics art director for The New York Times. Samuel Velasco is a former art director of Fortune and is also an award-winning illustrator. Visit 5W’s website at www.5wgraphics.com.
ALSO BY CALEB SCHARF
The Copernicus Complex: Our Cosmic Significance in a Universe of Planets and Probabilities
Gravity’s Engines: How Bubble-Blowing Black Holes Rule Galaxies, Stars, and Life in the Cosmos