Space/Planets

Sometimes if we just sit down and think of things, we get strange ideas. While these ideas are strange, that may not mean that what we are thinking about is impossible. Einstein had some famous quotes and one of them goes this way, “Imagination is more important than knowledge”. What I think he meant, if I can make a humble guess, is that knowledge is gained by things that have already happened or been invented, but imagination leads to new ideas and inventions. He also had this to say about common sense, “Common sense is the collection of prejudices acquired by age eighteen”. This is more easily figured out. He was saying that what we take for common sense, could be stopping us from seeing the real picture of things. Why am I talking about knowledge and common sense in the first place? It is simply to show that even if some idea or theory is way out there and seems ridiculous to some, it just might have a chance of being correct.

Could A Galaxy Exist That is Bigger Than Our Entire Universe?
Photo Source: NASA

This has allowed me to lay the ground work for what I am about to say. Please keep an open mind and don't dismiss it out of hand. Most of us think of the universe as what we can see with the most powerful telescopes and instruments, when we look in all directions. We pride ourselves on seeing further and further away and we even think that we are getting close to the beginning of things as we look at what we perceive as older and older galaxies. How many times have those of us that are interested in astronomy seen headlines that stated that the oldest galaxy has been found? It has happened quite few times in my lifetime I know, but even this has its problems. We equate distance with the shift to the red in the spectrum and we feel that the further out we see in space the more to the red things should be shifted. This means that what we look at should be very old if it is very red in the spectrum, but a very young galaxy was found about a year ago that has puzzled scientists. It is just about at the limit of the known universe and this should be impossible, according to the Big Bang theory that states that everything is moving away from each other.

This is not even the topic of this article today, I just used this illustration to show how wrong science can be. When we think of the universe we hardly ever think of very big or very small. I am not talking about the biggest star versus the smallest asteroid or anything like that. When I talk of small I am referring to something that may exist far beyond the particles that are obtained when smashing larger ones together. When I talk about big I am referring to one super atom that might be composed of our universe and part of some far bigger body, that with other bodies is composing another huge universe that is beyond our imagination. It used to be said that for all we know, we might be just a tiny part of some huge organism that is made up of many universes. I was thinking more along the lines of a universe that was composed of uncountable universes our size that compose the planets, stars and such. For all we know our universe in its entirety might just compose one grain of matter in the bigger universe. If we take this a step further, that huge universe might just compose a grain of matter in an ever bigger universe and this could go on for many times.

Particle Physicist Working With Smallest Particles
Photo Source: NASA

If there was life in these super galaxies, how could we ever communicate with it. Can you imagine a being that is bigger than billions upon billions of galaxies our size? There are now indications that our own universe is far bigger than we think. How will scientists explain that, when they thought that they got to the edge of the universe, if they find more to it? This is very likely to happen and it may not take too long since more and more powerful telescopes are being built every year. If scientists happen to see that the universe in infinite, that will really throw all those theories for a loop. Science does not like infinite, as it does not like forever. These two concepts just don't fit into science. In science everything must have a beginning and an end. Our brains are wired to expect this.

Switching to the tiny, this question has to be asked. Will we ever find that there are tiny universes that are so small that they exist in a yet undiscovered form of matter that we don't suspect exists? As we look at smaller and smaller particles and pieces of particles, will we ever find a tiny complete universe? This is a question that has been asked for many years now. I remember an old television show from the early 1950s, where a new microscope was supposedly invented that allowed scientists to see matter so tiny that they discovered a complete universe in a drop of water. One of the scientists would watch the tiny people go about their lives every day on one of the tiny planets and one day the drop of water dried up and everything was destroyed. This was only a television show of course, but it had to make one think if this could be possible and I guess the answer has to be who knows? If we are in one of these tiny universes we would never know and how insignificant would that make us?

Somehow I think that time would have to be involved with extra huge universes and tiny ones. An example of this might be that a day in one of these tiny universes might be only a tiny fraction of a second and if we could see one of these universes and look at the population on one of its tiny planets, they might evolve right before our eyes. On the other hand a day on a giant universe might be hundreds of thousands of our years and if we could observe a person on a planet in that universe, he or she would seen to remain unchanged and unmoving for millions of years. If any of what I talked about were true, we would have to rethink our universe and its origins and even its place in space. Then there are those that believe that if we could travel to either a super small or super large universe, our bodies would somehow adapt to the size of our surroundings. I personally don't see how this could happen.