Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: THURSDAY, February 3, 1994 TAG: 9402020098
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Joel Achenbach
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
A: One of the explicit policies of the Why staff is: Never Be Sizeist.
Just because most adult human beings are between 2 and 8 feet tall, other than Janet Reno, doesn't mean this is by any means the normal size of intelligent creatures. Maybe there are entire civilizations on the surfaces of atomic nuclei, right? Maybe when we clip our fingernails we are butchering billions of tiny beings who had been minding their own business until the gigantic clippers appeared up in the sky and everyone started screaming in extremely squeaky voices.
OK, so maybe not. But even though we all know this is a pretty stupid question, how many of us can honestly say we know why it's stupid?
We called someone who ought to know: Steve Weinberg, the University of Texas physicist and author of "Dreams of a Final Theory," which is about the search for an ultimate theory of physics that will explain everything that exists. Weinberg is definitely a 'spert.
He said the main evidence that there aren't miniature worlds or universes is that when we look at tiny objects like electrons they're all the same. Sameness increases as you move down the size scale. This tips us off that we're reaching the fundamental units of matter.
"There are reasons for strongly suspecting that there isn't anything very complicated inside the electron, and one of the reasons is that every electron is exactly like every other electron. If they had whole universes inside them, presumably they would all be a little different," Weinberg said.
Look around you and you'll see that everything looks different. Your spouse or lover, for example, looks nothing at all like your couch. Hopefully. Because things look different we know they are expressions of tinier building blocks arranged in different ways. Electrons aren't like that. They come in only one make and model. They're pretty insipid.
"They're interesting because they're boring," says Weinberg.
There are, to be sure, things other than electrons in the subatomic realm. Atoms were once thought of, by definition, as the smallest units of matter, but we know now that atoms are made up of protons and neutrons, and they in turn are made up of tiny particles called quarks, which supposedly come in different "flavors" and "spins" and whatnot, and it may be that quarks are made up of tiny loop-like "strings," but any way you slice it you find that it's basically mush down there.
Now if we go to the opposite end of the size scale we find a lot more scientific uncertainty. One of the big cosmological revelations of this century was the discovery that there are billions of galaxies outside of our own. And now some cosmologists think that our universe is just a fraction of the greater cosmos - that, as Weinberg puts it, "this universe which we call the Big Bang is just a small piece of a much larger universe, in which most parts are expanding very very rapidly and are basically empty, and it's only a few places like here where the expansion is slower and you have matter and the possibility of life."
In other words: We are on the fingernail.
The Mailbag:
Lloyd T. of Fort Myers, Fla., asks, "If Adam and Eve only had sons, who did they marry?"
Dear Lloyd: The Biblical policy was "Don't ask, don't tell."
Seriously, this is a question we run into fairly often, and all we can tell you is that there are some missing women in the story of Genesis.
"If you take Adam and Eve as actual literal historical people, you've got a real problem," says Alice Bellis, an Old Testament scholar at Howard University School of Divinity.
She notes that the name "Adam" is the Hebrew word for humanity. Thus the story is blatantly metaphorical.
"Throughout much of the early history of Israel, daughters are rarely mentioned," Bellis notes.
But trust us, they were there. It's just that whoever was in charge of putting the Genesis story into writing was not exactly, shall we say, Gloria Steinem.
Stephanie F. of Washington was one of many readers who set us straight about whether the Susan B. Anthony dollar was round: "The Susie was touted as being 11-sided but the 11 sides are merely embossed onto the facing of a flat, round, milled, silver coin." Apparently the government figured that blind people have such powerful, supernatural senses of touch that they could easily detect this subtle design element.
Meanwhile, James Benfield, executive director of The Coin Coalition, sent us a Susan B. and also one of the new Canadian dollars, the so-called "loony," because it shows a loon (a bird) on one side. The loony is truly 11-sided, with smooth rather than serrated edges, and it's gold, not silver. The Coin Coalition is a Washington lobbying group that is hoping the United States will kill the dollar bill and replace it with a new dollar coin.
Dear Jim: Do you think you can get us to mention your cause with a mere two-dollar bribe? With one of the dollars being Canadian? Don't insult us! We are professional journalists and are sending the money back immediately.
Five bucks, maybe we can talk.
by CNB