Space is so vast that even scientists struggle to picture its scale.
In this conversation, astrophysicist Nicole Gugliucci explains how analogies help us make sense of the cosmic distances that otherwise overwhelm the imagination.
Transcript:
Patrick McNameeKing: Nicole, how do humans make sense of the size of space?
Nicole Gugliucci: We have to use lots of analogies and lots of models.
When I teach introductory physics, I ask my students to look at their answer and see if it makes sense, right? Is the number something reasonable?
When I teach astrophysics, I tell them the number is never going to seem reasonable to you unless you know these numbers offhand. It's not going to relate to your everyday experience.
Patrick McNameeKing: All right, give me an example of a good analogy.
Nicole Gugliucci: I love using a football field as a distance measure, because I know what a football field feels like.
The sun's on one end and the outer solar system out to Neptune or Pluto is the other end. Planets the size of the earth and Mars, for example, are like little pen dots on that football field.
And so our brains just kind of break down when they really try and understand what those sizes are like.
Patrick McNameeKing: So if you're a scientist and your area of research is in this sort of giant scale, how do you keep up?
Nicole Gugliucci: Part of it is practice.
You get used to a certain range of numbers being appropriate for what you're looking at, but that's more memorization and routine than anything.
Like when I actually sit down to try and understand on a physical level what's happening, my brain breaks too.
It's just really amazing that we get to explore these things that are so fantastically weird and model them in a way that we can sort of understand.
But to really sit down and think about the size of it is overwhelming. One reason we use computer models and simulations and math to describe these things that don't make, you know, really physical sense in our brains.
But if you ask a poet to describe it, or if you ask a fiction writer to describe it, I think you're going to get some of the best descriptions.
If you have questions about the night sky send us an email at cosmic@nhpr.org
