Читать книгу Modern Alchemy and the Philosopher's Stone - Wilfried B. Holzapfel - Страница 42

“In describing the extra-terrestrial space in and around the solar system, we take the distance from Earth to the sun to be a special, natural unit. We refer to it as one astronomical unit (AU), or about 150 billion meters. You may have memorized this distance in grammar school as ninety-three million miles. You may also know by now that this distance is tiny in relation to the distance the light travels in a year. That distance, a light year (ly), is roughly 10¹⁶ meters! But astronomers also say that they observe galaxies in the universe that arose shortly after the creation of the universe, 13 billion years ago. The light from these stars must have traveled a distance of over 10²⁶ meters to get to us now!”

“When I was in grammar school, our class went on a field trip to the Science Center in our state. They had a continuously running movie that dramatized this scale as well as the one that we looked at last time. I did a search on the web for that movie after we met last week and was able to find it. It is called Powers of Ten. Charles and Ray Eames created it for IBM in 1977. You can watch it at http://powersof10.com/film. It only lasts about ten minutes, but it visually demonstrates all of the dimensions that we have talked about – except the ones for the quarks and neutrinos. I guess there were still some doubts about quarks in 1977.

“I have seen that film,” said the professor. “It has become quite famous.”

“Don’t they say that our universe is still expanding?” Helen asked.

“Yes,” replied Professor Wood. “About 13 billion years ago, the universe was much smaller than a single atom! An ordinary person cannot imagine that, but the cosmology of the Big Bang theory includes many related phenomena that have actually been observed in recent history. I mention that because, as you will see on our forthcoming journey, there are aspects of the Big Bang theory that touch upon the world of high pressure.”