Micro, Nano, Small: or some musings on the divine

Let's for a moment start with the basics.


This is a letter D.

Short of magnifying down to the point where all we can see is the constituent lines, this is the smallest building block of shareable thought we have at our disposal. But notice how there's so much more in this particular D than simply a letter. Made as a decoration for my room next year by my friends, this D represents and reflects different aspects of my personality. This is looking at the world from the perspective of the small.


One of the first things we did this quarter was watch this short clip of Sesame Street and explore how something tiny and simple can in effect be something far greater.



What is the image above? It's a little blurry, but even from those few lines, you should be able to tell that it's probably a key.



The Nano level, 10^-9, It can all be taken as an aesthetic metaphor of the comparative nature that size gives us. Looking at the world around us, what are we experiencing but a giant Mandelbrot Set? I noticed this when we watched that Powers of 10 video on the first or second day of class. What's the difference between an electron orbiting the nucleus of an atom versus moons around a planet versus planets around a star versus stars around a galaxy's core when you ignore factors like size? They're circles on an elliptical path around larger circles.

To me, that's an argument for Intelligent Design, especially if you think of it as being planned so that it'll all unfold this way on its own. Because the way I look at manipulation of events and people, a truly successful manipulator will never be seen, will never be heard and no one will even know that someone was in control to begin with. Everything will happen according to plan, and it will happen naturally.

I'm atheist with an outlook on life full of Buddhist influences, but if whatever God that is out there is Α and Ω, then they must also be one and all, big and small. To be omniscient and omnipresent, you must not merely experience the singularity, you must be and embody the singularity. By this then, the Big Bang theory doesn't disprove the existence of god, because the way I look at it, god was the Big Bang.

The elephant may be able to lift hundreds of pounds, but the ant can lift 20 times its own body weight just as effortlessly. (Another random fact I found while looking that up that made me think about the superorganism: An ant brain has about 250 000 brain cells. A human brain has 10,000 million so a colony of 40,000 ants has collectively the same size brain as a human.) Whichever is more impressive is just a matter of perspective, and ultimately, that's what the small does.