Tools for Understanding Space

Abstract

The universe is big. But it is also very fine-grained, and so there is important detail at both extremely tiny and unimaginably huge scales of size and distance. To fit this into the human mind, we need some tools. One of the most important of such tools is the ability to relax: abandon the idea that it can all make sense at once, and in detail. Instead, we learn how to split it up into pieces that are manageable to the human mind, and we then learn how to relate those piece to each other. In the sections that follow, I describe several methods that are useful for making sense of both the bigness and the tininess, while still keeping track of how it all fits together.