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Scientists have also done a good work to take measures to exist. They will tell you, for example, that the Planck length, the minimum length of any significance, within the legal framework of physics, is a billion a billion a billion a billion one centimeter. But these words, "million," "billion," what is really animals, we have the scale? Do you really feel how small yes? In the Elegant Universe, physicists Brian Gelin attempt to make things a little bit, can be even more obvious, and for readers. "If the scale of the expression of feeling," he wrote, "If we are to magnify the size of atoms in the known universe, only extended to the Planck length of the average tree height."           The Infinitesimal and the Infinite     We humans have learned quite a bit... about our cosmic connections. We've traced the history of the universe back to the tiniest fraction of a second after its Ultimate Beginning. We've devised powerful theories to explain how matter came from nothing and coalesced into stars and galaxies. We've described the formation of our own solar system and deciphered the very earliest history of our own planet. And we've begun to understand the origin of life.   Scientists have also done a remarkable job taking the measure of existence. They will tell you, for example, that the Planck length, the smallest length that makes any sense in the framework of the laws of physics, is a millionth of a billionth of a billionth of a billionth of a centimeter.   But do those words, "millionth" and "billionth" really mean anything to creatures our size? Do you really feel just how tiny that is?   In The Elegant Universe, physicist Brian Greene tries to make the tiniest thing that can be more palpable for readers. "To get a sense of scale," he writes, "if we were to magnify an atom to the size of the known universe, the Planck length would barely expand to the height of an average tree."   Astonishing, for sure. But do you have a feel for the size of the known universe, let alone how much stuff it contains? Astronomers tell us that the edge of the known universe is 14 billion light years away, give or take a couple of billion. That's the distance a photon of light, zooming at 186,000 miles a second, can travel in 14 billion years. Suffice it to say that a photon traveling from that cosmic horizon to a telescope here on Earth must traverse many trillions of trillions of miles of space.   Along the way, the peripatetic photon will travel a path through an exceedingly narrow slice of the cosmos. To get an idea of how many galaxies that slice contains, consider a single image from the Hubble Space Telescope's Deep Field Camera.   Such an image covers a tiny area of sky: a spot equivalent to the head of a pin held at arm's length. Yet within that head of a pin, hundreds of galaxies, each with many billions of stars, typically are visible.   So in this unimaginably vast realm, in which the scales of time and space span so many orders of magnitude, where do we fit?             — Tom Yulsman, Origins - The Quest for our Cosmic Roots             Indexes/05