The Detailed Universe: This will Blow Your Mind...

[Playinghardball]

[truedelphi]

1. Bookmarking for later viewing. n/t

[aidbo]

2. Reminds me of the old "Powers of Ten" short film

[Wilms]

4. Wow! Thanks, aidbo.

I saw that film way back then and never forgot it. And here it is again.

Thanks!

And yes. It's exactly what the OP reminded me of!

[aidbo]

8. You're welcome!

[Jim Lane]

6. I wonder what an update of this 1977 film would look like

With a proton centered on the screen, the narrator said that we had reached the limit of our understanding. I think they could do one more screen now, but I don't know about two.

[aidbo]

7. Well, we just 'discovered' the Higgs boson not too long ago..

..which according to this link https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-physical-size-of-a-Higgs-boson is about 1/100th the size of a proton.

Higgs Boson
What is the physical size of a Higgs boson?
1 Answer
Leo C. Stein
Leo C. Stein, Postdoctoral scholar
3.9k Views
The most appropriate length scale I'd associate with the Higgs is about 10?17m, which is about 1/100th the size of a proton. This is the Compton wavelength associated with a mass of 125 GeV. The Higgs boson is a resonance, though, so it doesn't just sit around like protons do. As soon as a Higgs boson is created, it almost immediately decays into other particles—so it doesn't really have a "size".

Though, as he says, it's not that meaningful to talk about.

The generally accepted 'smallest distance' is the Planck length. On the order of 10^-36 meters.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planck_length

There is currently no proven physical significance of the Planck length; it is, however, a topic of theoretical research. Since the Planck length is so many orders of magnitude smaller than any current instrument could possibly measure, there is no way of examining it directly. According to the generalized uncertainty principle (a concept from speculative models of quantum gravity), the Planck length is, in principle, within a factor of 10, the shortest measurable length

We can now, with specialized equipment, directly image and manipulate atoms, and that's super cool.

[erronis]

12. And interestingly, there was an article on how we really could never know

how determined these "physical" entities are defined.

Something to do with Godel's unsolvability problem. It seems like even basic physics will have some "truths" that can't be proven.
http://phys.org/news/2015-12-quantum-physics-problem-unsolvable-godel.html

Personally, yea!

In the USofA: cue the science deniers.

[valerief]

15. It's always a boy who gets to play with atoms. nt

[Javaman]

14. I first saw that at the Smithsonian during the Bicentennial.

still wonderful.

[BlueJazz]

3. If I don't get to sleep-over at Jamie's the whole world will end. My life will be over.

[cstanleytech]

5. Shows how insignificant we are compared to the rest of the universe. nt

[valerief]

16. Why does small size always equate to insignificance? We're significant to us. nt

[packman]

9. Makes the question even more significant

Where's Waldo?

[aidbo]

11. The right frame of reference makes that question so easy!

“Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there-on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam."

[erronis]

13. I only wish that the people that think they are important would hear these words. Thanks.

[gregcrawford]

10. Cosmic!