Comparisons

Whenever I’m thinking about something outside of the realm of human experience, like an unimaginably long amount of time or a vast distance I have no basis to understand, I like to make comparisons. My reasoning is that if I can’t understand something in absolute terms, maybe I can understand it in relative terms.

It’s also really fun to compare things that aren’t normally compared.

For example, there are more atoms in a single grain of sand than there are grains of sand on Earth. If you’re Cliff on Cheers, you will happily collect this tidbit of information for your eventual Jeopardy appearance, but what about for the rest of us?

It turns out that stretching your brain in this way is very useful. Here, we can understand that the world of the very tiny is every bit as wondrous and complex as the world of the very large. Consider how small and insignificant the size of a grain of sand seems to you when you brush it off of your bed sheets at the beach, and then remember that there’s a t…