Big Think Brian Cox: The incomprehensible scales that rule the Universe
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Oct 11, 2025 Physicist Brian Cox challenges our understanding of measurement, revealing how human-centric units obscure the vastness of the universe. Discover the significance of fundamental constants like the speed of light and gravity, which govern cosmic behavior. Probe the astonishing Planck length and its implications for understanding the smallest scales of reality. Explore the immense distances in our galaxy and beyond, including the ancient light from distant galaxies, illustrating the universe's mind-boggling scale and the nature of cosmic existence.
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Human Measurement Units Are Arbitrary
- Human units like feet and meters are based on biology, not universal constants.
- Aliens would likely use entirely different measurement systems unrelated to human scale.
Universe's Fundamental Constants
- The universe has fundamental constants: speed of light, gravity's strength, and Planck's constant.
- These constants define the Planck length, about 10⁻³⁵ meters, the smallest meaningful length.
Scale of the Planck Length
- The Planck length is unimaginably small, about 10⁻³⁵ meters.
- A proton scaled to the solar system size compared to Planck length scaled to a virus shows this vast difference in scales.
