Size Relationships of Big History Objects: From the Universe to the Atomic Nucleus David J. LePoire

Abstract

Big History involves a variety of sizes from the atomic nucleus to the size of the universe. How can we make sense of this? A popular video (Eames 1977) about the power of 10 took a "picture" for every factor of 10 in distance with over 40 "stops" from a nucleus (not even the smallest distance we can talk about) to the edge of the universe. Instead, we will explore just nine steps in distances of things we know about: the atomic nucleus, the atom, a bacterium, a human, the Earth, the distance to the sun, the distance to the closest star, the size of the galaxy, and the size of the universe. Quite amazingly, many of these distances can be estimated with only a few fundamental physics constants. Also, the ratio of the distances of the larger to the next smaller is about the same (with some exceptions): about 150,000. How can this factor of 150,000 be visualized? It is about the ratio of a commercial jet's height compared to your palm, or, using the American standard unit of a football field, the smaller distance would be about 1/32 of an inch.

Complexity growth patterns in the Big History: Preliminary results of a quantitative analysis

“…There are all grounds to maintain that the deceleration of planetary macroevolutionary development has also already begun -and it started a few decades before the singularity time points detected both in Modis -Kurzweil and Panov. This is well supported by the growing body of evidence suggesting the start of the long term deceleration of the global techo-scientific and economic growth rates in the recent decades (see, e.g., Krylov 1999Krylov , 2002Krylov , 2007Huebner 2005;Khaltourina & Korotayev, 2007;Maddison 2007;Modis 2002Modis , 2005Modis , 2012Modis , 2020Akaev 2010;Gordon 2012;Teulings & Baldwin, 2014;Piketty 2014;LePoire 2005LePoire , 2009LePoire , 2013LePoire , 2015aLePoire , 2015bLePoire , 2020aLePoire , 2020bKorotayev & Bilyuga 2016;Popović, 2018;LePoire & Chandrankunnel, 2020;LePoire & Devezas, 2020;Widdowson, 2020). Now, let us sum up our quantitative analysis of the accelerating growth of complexity traced on our planet for four billion years since the emergence of life on the Earth.…”

“…4 Note, however, that most of the students of the global accelerating growth of complexity still prefer to deal with periods between phase transitions rather than phase transition rates (see, e.g., Panov, 2005Panov, , 2020Grinchenko & Shchapova, 2010LePoire, 2014LePoire, , 2016LePoire, , 2020aLePoire, , 2020bDobrolyubov, 2020;Malkov, 2020;Faixat, 2022). Note that Alexander Panov and Theodore Modis compiled their time series entirely independently of each other.…”

“…On the one hand, it has been shown that the global hyperbolic acceleration pattern of the last 4 billion years appears to have been produced endogenously by the second order positive feedback between the complexity of the global sociobiological system and the rate of its complexity growth: the more complex the global biosocial system, the less time it takes it to make the next complexity jump -thus, the more complex the global system was, the faster its complexity grew. It has been shown that when written mathematically, such a feedback produces precisely a hyperbolic acceleration effect (see, e.g., von Foerster et al, 1960;Taagepera, 1976Taagepera, , 1979Kremer, 1993;Kurzweil, 2001;Tsirel, 2004;Korotayev, 2005Korotayev, , 2006aKorotayev, , 2006bKorotayev, , 2007Korotayev, , 2013Korotayev, , 2018Korotayev, , 2020bKorotayev & Khaltourina, 2006;Korotayev et al, 2006aKorotayev et al, , 2006bMarkov & Korotayev, 2007, 2008Korotayev & S. Malkov, 2012;Grinin et al, 2013;Korotayev & A. Malkov, 2016;LePoire, 2014LePoire, , 2015aLePoire, , 2015bLePoire, , 2016LePoire, , 2020aLePoire, , 2020b.…”

“…However, this has been only published as a presentation at the 2nd International Big History Association Conference at Dominican College in San Rafael, CA in August 2014 (LePoire, 2014) and it does not appear to have been noticed by big historians. In addition, in this presentation, his analysis of the post-Big Bang universal evolution deceleration pattern, while being basically correct, was rather brief and lacked much detail (unlike his later very thorough and detailed mathematical analysis of the accelerating growth of complexity traced on our planet for four billion years after the emergence of life on the Earth [LePoire, 2016[LePoire, , 2020a[LePoire, , 2020b).…”

“…The point that within the Big History the decelerating growth of complexity in the Universe observed after the Big Bang can be contrasted with the accelerating growth of complexity traced on our planet for four billion years after the emergence of life on the Earth has been already noticed on quite a number of occasions (e.g., Panov, 2007Panov, , 2008Tsirel 2009;LePoire, 2014LePoire, , 2016LePoire, , 2020bNazaretyan 2017b;Panov et al, 2020;Faixat, 2022).…”