Boxes within Boxes within Boxes
You live inside more than just one Reality.
These aren’t different regions with boundary lines between them. They are Realities of different sizes, and the boundaries between them are boundaries of scale. Each Reality is nested inside the one above it and holds a smaller Reality within.
You hold entire microscopic Realities in your hand. And you live inside Realities so immense that their edges stretch out way beyond your brain’s ability to imagine.
Our human brains evolved in the space between a gnat and a mountain, so those are the natural limits of our perception. If you try to picture something outside of that range, your imagination begins to fail you. How much smaller than a gnat is an atom? How much larger than a mountain is the Earth?
Even the answers to those two questions don’t tell us much. When I say that you’d have to line up 4,500 Mount Everests (laid sideways, base-to-summit) to circle the Earth, or that it would take 18 million hydrogen atoms to create a line equal the length of a gnat’s body, both of these configurations would be hard to picture.
A better strategy is to play around with the sizes of everything – shrinking everything down or expand it all up until the objects we’re looking at end up within our gnat-to-mountain range of perception.
A good example of that strategy are those diagrams depicting the planets of the Solar System, which you can find everywhere from elementary school classrooms to the kids’ placemats at Denny’s. Those merry little planets swarming around the Sun in tightly-packed concentric rings.
Of course, on a Denny’s placemat, scientific accuracy isn’t really the goal. Even so, many reasonable adults go through their entire lives imagining the actual Solar System looks more or less like this.
They are, of course, wrong. Everything is wrong here, from the comparative sizes of the planets, to the distance between them, to the shape and paths of their orbits. The truth is much, much more interesting.
Here is a much more accurate comparison: if we shrunk down the entire Universe until the Sun was the size of a basketball, then the Earth would be the size of the inside of this lower- case “o.” Of course, you can’t depict a size difference that large on a placemat, which is why Denny’s doesn’t even try.
But the real stunner is the distance between them. How far apart do you imagine our basketball Sun and our letter-o Earth would be from one another? A foot? A yard? Three yards? Ten?
On this scale, the actual distance between the Sun and the Earth would be 28 yards – almost the length of a basketball court, hoop to hoop.
Now, imagine yourself standing under a basketball basket. Peering across the court, you see your friend under the other basket, and . . . what’s that he’s got in his hand? Looks like a tiny bead.
If you can imagine how hard it would be to spot a bead across a basketball court, then congratulations: you now have your first clear idea of the size of the Earth compared to its distance from the Sun.
Now forget everything – the park around you, the hoop above you, the blacktop under your feet – and picture just you and your friend floating in open space. The only things that exist are the two of you and the space in between. And that space is empty.
Almost empty. Sometimes, floating in the open space in front of you, you might catch sight of another bead and a grain of sand. The bead is Venus and the sand grain is Mercury.
That’s a very tiny collection of stuff for such a comparatively wide space. But we’ll see later on that the inner Solar System is practically a traffic jam compared to interstellar and intergalactic space.
Even though you’ve now got an idea of the scale of the inner Solar System, it’s only an idea – an approximation. The actual Solar System is still so big that your brain isn’t even capable of imagine it (at least not to any degree of accuracy).
The simple fact of the matter is that human beings don’t live at this scale. I’ll go even farther than that: human beings don’t even exist on this scale. It works the other way too: even though you’ve been living in the Solar System your entire life, you can’t really say you’ve ever been there. When Mercury passes between the Earth and the Sun, it changes nothing for us here on the ground (even if you know it’s happening, which most of us don’t).
When viewed this way, it becomes clear that the Solar System is really in a totally separate Universe of its own – an Alternate Reality. Our two Realities border on one another, but what happens in one rarely has any impact on the other. The rotation of Venus has as much effect on you as you have on the planet Venus.
And this is just the Reality directly above our own. It, too, is nestled inside a larger Reality, and another one, and another. We have much, much farther to go.