Thursday Things: Counting Atoms Edition
22 July 2021. Vol 3 No 29 By Dan McGirt. #102
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I’m just feeling vaguely purple and slightly out of focus. Photo by Jr Korpa on Unsplash
How many atoms are in the observable universe? Space.com does the math to estimate how many atoms there are in the universe. Short version: a lot. How they get to their answer is the bulk of the article, and it is an interesting calculation (How big is the observable universe? How many stars are there? — just a few of the questions asked along the way) if you are a space and/or math nerd.
To start out "small," there are around 7 octillion, or 7x10^27 (7 followed by 27 zeros), atoms in an average human body, according to The Guardian. Given this vast sum of atoms in one person alone, you might think it would be impossible to determine how many atoms are in the entire universe. And you'd be right: Because we have no idea how large the entire universe really is, we can't find out how many atoms are within it.
However, it is possible to work out roughly how many atoms are in the observable universe — the part of the universe that we can see and study — using some cosmological assumptions and a bit of math.
And as a bonus, you get the number of atoms in the human body!1
Dogs totally have our number. Dogs ‘just get’ humans in ways other animals can’t, evolutionary scientists conclude
Study authors, who compared wolf pups raised by humans to dogs who had barely any contact with people, discovered that dogs still outperform their wolf counterparts in tests of their understanding and co-operation with humans. The team behind the research adds their results show dogs instinctively understand people.
“This study really solidifies the evidence that the social genius of dogs is a product of domestication,” says Dr. Brian Hare, a professor of evolutionary anthropology, in a university release. …
Much like human infants, the team finds puppies intuitively understand what a human is doing when they point at something. Wolf puppies, on the other hand, did not pick up on this.
This is why dogs make such good dog mayors — they understand their constituents, probably better than people do.
Poetry Deathmatch! A while back, Literary Hub compiled a list of what they call The 32 Most Iconic Poems in the English Language. Many of the usual suspects (i.e. poems almost everyone has probably heard of, if not read in English class) make the list. And this raises the obvious question — 32 is a perfect number for setting up brackets and conducting a poetry deathmatch, so why didn’t Literary Hub do that and find the English language’s most iconic poem? If there was a mechanism for conducting polls through Substack, I would totally do that right now.
“The Raven” vs. ‘Jabberwocky”, “Ozymandias’ vs “Kubla Khan”, ‘The Road Not Taken” vs. “Do Not Go Gentle into that Good Night” … I’m really not sure how some of these matches would turn out.2
Oh, well, a missed opportunity, Literary Hub. Some less obvious questions are, how many of these 32 “iconic” poems have you read? Is your favorite poem on the list? Do you have a favorite poem? (Dirty limericks don’t count, sorry.)
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Somewhere I have a hard copy of an article about how many angels can dance on the head of a pin that goes through the math in a way similar to this article and also arrives at a huge number. I’ll share that answer in a future edition if I can find it.
But I would bet Poe and Frost both make the final four, because what this contest would probably turn on is name ID and at least for non-English majors, those are probably the two best known poets.