Columnists
Surfers' paradise
Dixe Wills

Funny creatures, humans: regardless of our relative insignificance,
we routinely imagine ourselves the centre of the universe and act
accordingly. Personally, I blame the lack of definitive proof that
there are other, more advanced, life-forms out there in the murky
vastnesses of space. Also, there's that belief that prevails in
many Christian circles that the human species is uniquely beloved
of God and that, as his trusted enforcers, we can treat the Cosmos
pretty much as we like. Of course, we could argue until the nuns
come home about our place in the spiritual hierarchy of universe
(my belief is that, if pushed, God would admit to a preference for
Klingons over humans). However, thanks to a beautifully conceived
website called The Scale of the Universe (scaleofuniverse.com) our
physical place in the firmament is now a whole lot easier to
determine. Click the start button and, backed by ethereal musical,
our journey begins. On the opening screen we find some objects that
share our human scale, including a beach ball and a dodo. Brushing
aside the fact that it's difficult to compare oneself with a
species that no longer exists, we dive into the well of things that
are smaller than us. Basketballs and rulers give way to humming
birds and matchsticks. We push on, past ants and mist droplets,
strands of DNA and Gamma ray wavelengths smaller than helium atoms.
But yet there is more, even as we pass a sign admitting 'Lengths
shorter than this are not confirmed'. The 'Range of the Weak
Force', Up Quarks and Down Quarks (both of which dwarf Top Quarks
of course) and finally, right at the bottom of the well and
measuring less than 0.0000000001 yoctometres, come Quantum foam,
string - presumably we're talking 'theory' rather than 'ball of'
here - and Planck. So much for small. Going in the opposite
direction, we soon pass the things of Earth - blue whales, the
Large Hadron Collider, Italy - and head off into space encountering
heavenly bodies with names that sound like discontinued Ikea coffee
tables: Rigel, Gacrux, Deneb, anyone? Soon we're on the scale of
the Kuiper Belt, the Homunculus Nebula and Gomez' Hamburger. By
this point, these objects drifting through space have begun to look
eerily similar to creatures that live in the deepest darkest
reaches of our oceans. By the time we're at the limits of the
observable universe the scale is so immense that it's barely
comprehensible. A video on the website neatly ties together the
utter immensity of the universe, the extraordinarily tiny things
within it, and our place somewhere in between. Astrophysicist Dr.
Neil DeGrasse Tyson points out that the atoms of which we ourselves
are composed came from the stars. 'I know that we are part of this
universe. We are in this universe. But perhaps most important than
both of those facts is that the universe is in us.'