by somebody in a band called the Beatles, an accordion—“squeezebox” to Papa—that was Clifton Chenier’s, and a lot of other historical axes.
What Mama had done was grab Dizzy Gillespie’s bent trumpet off the wall, stand on a chair, put the bell up to the knothole in the ceiling, and nearly pop our eardrums. I could have wished she had used Mozart’s harpsichord instead. My ears were ringing for hours.
—
After a quick cleanup, we joined them in the bedroom.
“Jubal, you want to take up where you left off?”
Well, Papa did
want
to do that, but his language skills are never quite up to just telling a story in a meaningful sequence. That brilliant brain that understands quantum physics like I understand the sprockets on a flycycle just leaps from one thing to another without much logical sense behind it. Maybe that’s what makes his mind able to make those leaps in mathematical and scientific logic that no one else can follow. All the remaining language logic circuits in his brain are already tied up in other stuff.
So there is not much point in my trying to set it all down as he told it. It took two hours to get it all in a form the other four of us could follow, if not completely understand. A summary will work much better.
This is what Papa told us:
—
The universe,
cher
, it be a strange place . . .
We figure that the observable universe is about 93 billion light-years across. It’s 13.5 billion years old. There are hundreds of billions of galaxies, maybe even a trillion, though that’s a tough number to pin down, and it refers only to the “observable universe,” which is that part of the universe we can theoretically interact with. There are probably parts—maybe even the majority of it—that we can never interact with, even if we were traveling at the speed of light, because the universe can expand
faster
than the speed of light. As we head for the edge of it, I guess, the edge gets farther and farther away. If it
has
an edge, which it probably doesn’t.
All this, according to Papa. I’ll take his word for it.
So, say a trillion galaxies. Our Milky Way has about four hundred billion stars in it. Most of the others do, too, or even more. That comes to about one hundred sextillion stars. Some are much, much bigger than Old Sun, some are much smaller. Say Old Sun is about average in mass—I have no idea if it is, but just say. It masses about two octillion tons.
Two octillion tons (2 times 10 27 ) times one hundred sextillion stars (10 23 ) equals two hundred quindecillion tons (2 times 10 50 ), the mass of all the stars in the observable universe. You can throw in all the planets, asteroids, comets, and such and not affect the final total much; it’s like tossing a few pennies in a bucket of hundred-dollar coins. (There’s also a hell of a lot of neutrinos, but let’s not even go there. I don’t like neutrinos; their very existence offends me.) I like to write out numbers like that, because it gives me a better sense of just how huge they are. Two hundred quindecillion looks like this:
200,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000
That’s the mass of all the stars there are, and it seems like so much. It sounds pretty crowded, too, but it’s not. You could travel almost eternally through it at the speed of light and your chances of hitting a star would be virtually zero. Galaxies collide with each other all the time, vast conglomerations of a hundred billion stars, but the stars are so small, relatively, and so spread out with such immense distances between them that collisions of stars are very rare.
And stars are not even the bulk of it. If you add in the free hydrogen and helium
between
the stars and galaxies, you would have to multiply that huge number by four.
And
that’s
far from the end of it. That is the
visible
universe. We see stars by the light they give off, and clouds of gas by the effects they have on the starlight passing through them.
What Mama had done was grab Dizzy Gillespie’s bent trumpet off the wall, stand on a chair, put the bell up to the knothole in the ceiling, and nearly pop our eardrums. I could have wished she had used Mozart’s harpsichord instead. My ears were ringing for hours.
—
After a quick cleanup, we joined them in the bedroom.
“Jubal, you want to take up where you left off?”
Well, Papa did
want
to do that, but his language skills are never quite up to just telling a story in a meaningful sequence. That brilliant brain that understands quantum physics like I understand the sprockets on a flycycle just leaps from one thing to another without much logical sense behind it. Maybe that’s what makes his mind able to make those leaps in mathematical and scientific logic that no one else can follow. All the remaining language logic circuits in his brain are already tied up in other stuff.
So there is not much point in my trying to set it all down as he told it. It took two hours to get it all in a form the other four of us could follow, if not completely understand. A summary will work much better.
This is what Papa told us:
—
The universe,
cher
, it be a strange place . . .
We figure that the observable universe is about 93 billion light-years across. It’s 13.5 billion years old. There are hundreds of billions of galaxies, maybe even a trillion, though that’s a tough number to pin down, and it refers only to the “observable universe,” which is that part of the universe we can theoretically interact with. There are probably parts—maybe even the majority of it—that we can never interact with, even if we were traveling at the speed of light, because the universe can expand
faster
than the speed of light. As we head for the edge of it, I guess, the edge gets farther and farther away. If it
has
an edge, which it probably doesn’t.
All this, according to Papa. I’ll take his word for it.
So, say a trillion galaxies. Our Milky Way has about four hundred billion stars in it. Most of the others do, too, or even more. That comes to about one hundred sextillion stars. Some are much, much bigger than Old Sun, some are much smaller. Say Old Sun is about average in mass—I have no idea if it is, but just say. It masses about two octillion tons.
Two octillion tons (2 times 10 27 ) times one hundred sextillion stars (10 23 ) equals two hundred quindecillion tons (2 times 10 50 ), the mass of all the stars in the observable universe. You can throw in all the planets, asteroids, comets, and such and not affect the final total much; it’s like tossing a few pennies in a bucket of hundred-dollar coins. (There’s also a hell of a lot of neutrinos, but let’s not even go there. I don’t like neutrinos; their very existence offends me.) I like to write out numbers like that, because it gives me a better sense of just how huge they are. Two hundred quindecillion looks like this:
200,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000
That’s the mass of all the stars there are, and it seems like so much. It sounds pretty crowded, too, but it’s not. You could travel almost eternally through it at the speed of light and your chances of hitting a star would be virtually zero. Galaxies collide with each other all the time, vast conglomerations of a hundred billion stars, but the stars are so small, relatively, and so spread out with such immense distances between them that collisions of stars are very rare.
And stars are not even the bulk of it. If you add in the free hydrogen and helium
between
the stars and galaxies, you would have to multiply that huge number by four.
And
that’s
far from the end of it. That is the
visible
universe. We see stars by the light they give off, and clouds of gas by the effects they have on the starlight passing through them.
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