video thumbnail 4:44
Scale of the Universe

2013-08-05

[public] 710K views, 19.1K likes, 3.71K dislikes audio only

channel thumbSixty Symbols

Filmed at CERN and the LHC. Behind the scenes at: http://youtu.be/5vZ6cwDXVF0 Sub to sixtysymbols: http://bit.ly/sixtysymbols ... Song by Dave Lens (http://bit.ly/boychannel) featuring ViHart (http://bit.ly/vihartchannel)

iTunes: http://bit.ly/16qNETg

Another "spoken" version by Dave: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eqODDLlMNJ0

Visit our website at http://www.sixtysymbols.com/

We're on Facebook at http://www.facebook.com/sixtysymbols

And Twitter at http://twitter.com/#!/periodicvideos

This project features scientists from The University of Nottingham

http://www.nottingham.ac.uk/physics/index.aspx

Sixty Symbols videos by Brady Haran

A run-down of Brady's channels:

http://periodicvideos.blogspot.co.uk/2012/06/here-are-my-channels.html

LYRICS

If you were to

/ Zoom in / phase-out,

move in / focus on this

Human / whose cells magnify

as you fly through them, and see

Atoms, looming /

but you keep shooting past

protons, bosons, quarks 'til even a

part of a particle's too big / Then

boom / an end to the intrusion

/ As you hit the resolution of the

universe / the strands of its fabric

the tiniest fragment / the planck length,

past that, Gravity becomes

fallacy, try contrasting that with the

galaxies / try to grasp the huge magnitude

of the universe it's unimaginable.

But let's try anyway.

If that

insane length was one dollar bill

/ Then to reach the

wavelength of the smallest particles

Quarks, that are so fundamental

they don't have an inherent size

would be the current price you'd gain if you sold

Mount Everest made out of gold.

That is insane.

if you applied the Midas touch to my mind

it'd be quite enough to buy a car to drive

And the gluons and 3 quarks combined

make a large hadron those guys collide;

a proton / and to magnify to that

size would turn that Midas mountain

into a diamond / my

mind made of that could buy you an island

/ and next we ramp up, from

quarks and protons to atoms,

atoms the fractions of matter the ones that

that grant us our mass, and

if that quark was counted every time you take a

/ single breath / you'd respire

Midas mountains then

until your death

/ and if that life / was compressed

into one lock of hair / then as we

climb / up the rest / of these

atomic stairs / then we'd pass

/ DNA / when we get to my red streak

and the size of our cells

/ we equate / to every

hair on my head...

[Sometimes you make me feel so small

Can't comprehend your size

Yet I'm a giant in your eyes]

If we took my

head of hair that a cell represents

lifetimes of Midas Everest breaths

and then you would stretch it out to the skyline,

again and again

you'd find circle round the earth 10 times

before you meet me... and you.   

Right here the reach of a human,

a meter or two / and if we were to choose

one song to represent those

horizons, an MP3 on our

device then to reach the size of the earth

compared to like our size

that's a terabyte hard drive filled with our files

it seems immense

And if we compress that collection to one word

to represent our world, then scaling coefficients

from the planet to the solar system

would let me re-read the whole of deathly hallows

awesome.

And then to travel between stars

as we take to the skies

Would be 10 times every word

you'll ever say in your life

And as an analogy of the expanse of

galaxies up in space

10 times the total of every word

in every book ever made

And to move up to the scale of galaxy clusters

would be every word said by everyone in Shanghai, in London

Berlin, delhi, LA, Mumbai, Sao Paulo and Moscow

Jakarta, Karachi, Dubai, Telford, Tokyo and Stockholm

And then to galaxy superclusters in the large-scale structure

with filaments that feel inadequately described as humungous

since if we stay with the scale of Earth as a word that equates

to all the words everyone alive today will ever say

finally we reach the biggest physical thing we can confirm

The indescribable size of the observable universe

which would be more than every word that every person ever has said

Every word that was ever written and every word that was ever read

[Sometimes you make me feel so small

Can't comprehend your size

Yet I'm a giant in your eyes.

I can't control the scope

But I'm not losing hope]

To summarise

Every word that every person has ever said in their lives

where each word implies enough MP3s to fill a terabyte hard drive

Where each song is 10 times the number drives to the horizon

that it'd take to ride around the world each time you set eyes on one

where each horizon is a head of hairs

and every hair there is the length of a lifetime

and each breath in that life is the price

of mount everest made entirely by midas

and that finally describes it, and it's increasing in size

So each time you listen to this song again

it'll be even more difficult to comprehend.