The Speculist

Wow, wow, wowie wow wow. 3.6 billion km diameter for My Cephei! I had no idea that stars could be that big. That's larger than the orbit of Pluto, IIRC.

Ok, it's more than half the semi-major axis of the orbital of Pluto, but wow!

Does anyone else get a little... queasy... contemplating magnitudes like this?

Sort of gets my heart rate up like staring over the side of a cliff or something.

Maybe it's just me.

:-)

from my brother:

nice!

the space between these things is literally orders of magitude bigger, though. and don't get me started about intergalactic distaces

This reminds me of something I've been thinking about for no apparently useful reason: there are 200 billion stars in the Milky Way and there are 30 trillion synapses in the human brain.

How would the comparison of the ratio of the nodes to the distance between those nodes in their defined neighborhood compare?

I.e.,
(30trillion) / (sum of average synaptic gap:brain size)
vs.
(200billion) / (sum of average distance between stars in the Milky Way)

In my thinking this relates to my understanding of the String Theory premise that matter is the perception of localized, organized energy- that there is no substance and the matter/energy distinction is subjective. I.e., everything is mostly space.