GREAT AND SMALL
GRASPING THE SCALE OF THINGS
He has made everything beautiful in its time. He has also set eternity in the hearts of men; yet they cannot fathom what God has done from beginning to end.
– Ecclesiastes 3:11
In a recent trip to New York City I had opportunity to tour around Manhattan on a ferry, and also see it from within, craning my neck to look up at skyscrapers. I marveled at the city from beneath, beholding the sheer volume of humanity being shuffled by its subway trains, and again from above, from atop the Empire State Building and later peering out the window on the flight back home. I found that my efforts toward absorbing as much as possible of my six day stay were often directed toward simply comprehending the scale of things.
In our attempts to comprehend greatness and smallness, we naturally make comparisons. We understand the strength and rigidity of a rhinoceros beetle supporting 850 times its own weight by comparing it to a 150-lb man supporting 127,000 pounds. We grasp the leaping ability of a flea by comparing its acceleration to that of the space shuttle: the flea has 50 times greater acceleration, and if scaled to the size of person, it would leap about 900 feet! Another mind bender is the 
glorious Iguazu Falls in Argentina: To get a handle on this we describe its width as three times that of Niagara Falls, and that it boasts a flow of up to 2.1 Olympic-sized swimming pools per second. (This comparison, of course, assumes that one has seen and comprehended Niagara Falls, and spent significant time in an Olympic-sized swimming pool.)
In our first attempts at comprehending scale, we are usually drawn to big things. But what is unique about large things? Many patterns in nature are “fractal,” meaning that they are essentially the same at any scale. There is no way to know the size of a cloud without some visual clue of comparison, as a cloud’s outline at any scale is virtually the same. Similarly, a small rock can be employed as a towering cliff in a miniaturized film set, as it has essentially the same appearance. The massive hotels along the Las Vegas strip baffle the weary tourist who walks on and on and seems to get nowhere—they look big, but turn out to be much bigger, like a Times Square on steroids. Designers and artists use such visual cues to home us in on a sense of scale, or even to trick us otherwise, and scientists put a coin or person’s hand into a picture so that the specimen’s size is properly interpreted.
Our fascination with scale was illustrated remarkably in the classic film Powers of Ten, which is now available at www.powersof10.com. The film begins with a downward view of a single square meter of a picnic, and proceeds to zoom out a factor of ten (10 m2, 100 m2, etc.) every second until we marvel at the insignificance of the picnickers in the vastness of the universe. Then it proceeds to zoom us back in, and takes us into the mysteries of the inner space within atoms. The picnic becomes strangely insignificant, observed at just one level of a mind-boggling range of scale, both small and great. We get the feeling that we are only privy to a slice of the reality of space in which we are embedded. In like fashion, on my recent trip, I visited the American Museum of Natural History, which has a wide display showing the “location” of things (galaxies, planets, humans, microbes, atoms) along a series of placards representing scale changes in powers of ten.
Mathematicians have devised ways to compress scale such that powers of ten can be understood more easily. One way is through exponential notation, such that instead of de
scribing the width of a thin hair as 0.000018 meters, we describe it as 18 microns. So then everything else measurable in a few to a hundred or so microns is now easily comparable to something we can picture. Earthquakes have been measured and compared using the well-known Richter scale, now replaced by a similar “moment magnitude” scale. Thus, although earthquake energies may vary by a factor of a million, we typically hear of earthquakes described simply in the range of 3 to 7 on the magnitude scale. Similarly our ears can safely perceive sound varying in energy by a factor of trillions, but to get a handle on the practical differences, the decibel scale is used: 0 dB is the threshold of hearing, 60 dB is the level of conversational speech, and 120 dB is produced by the deafening sound of a diesel engine room.
Yet while most things can be perceived in multiples and divisions, various levels of scale do have unique characteristics, as evidenced by the beetle and flea mentioned earlier. Many physicists recognize “quantam effects” that apply only to the extremely miniscule. And due to how God put matter together using discrete particles, helter-skelter motions and forces at the microscopic scale become smooth and more easily modeled at a larger scale. Furthermore, the properties of things change inherently with size: For example, a super-sized insect would be unable to fly because the surface-area-to-volume ratio of anything decreases as its size increases; thus a super-sized insect would effectively fall through air like you or I would, rather than “swimming” through it rapidly as insects normally do.
So we find that we may get lost in the vastness of the concept of scale, wondering perhaps whether our universe might be contained in a single atom of another. But at the same time we may become baffled by the uniqueness of the view within a given window of scale (such that a less-powerful microscope setting can be more impressive than getting “lost” by being zoomed in too far). What are we to make of all this?
Firstly, I think an important principle is that this is not so much about size and space as it is about systemization. What is remarkable is not that something can be a billion times larger while another thing can be a billion times smaller, but rather that there exists systemized order at all levels. Sure, our bodies are composed of trillions of cells working wonderfully together to provide communication, capture and use of energy, processing of nutrition and waste, and so on; yet each one of those cells also has its own systems for doing the very same. Biology textbooks love to hail the cell as the “building block” of life, and have in the past erroneously called it the “simple cell,” thinking that we, and other multicellular organisms, are merely complex through evolutionary aggregation of these cells. Yet a single bacteria, the simplest of living things, has all the systemization necessary to maintain its life: transfer of genetic information, capture and use of energy, processing of nutrition and waste, and so on. What are its building blocks? In the same way, what is remarkable about skyscrapers, miniscule in the scope of mountains and seas, is that in addition to steel, concrete, glass, and a myriad of wiring and plumbing, they contain offices with employees, all working on various tasks, toward well-determined purposes well beyond that building; meanwhile one single person in a cubicle on the 49th floor finishes her sandwich and tosses her apple core into the wastebasket, and this too is significant.
Secondly, I believe that our efforts to wrap our minds around everything through comparison lead us to consider our own significance. And beautifully, our inability to compress all scale into a single understanding (and that we even try to do so) actually shows our significance. Take for example the reaction to Voyager 
1’s 1990 distant photo of the “pale blue dot” that is planet Earth. Famed astronomer Carl Sagan reflected eloquently years later: “Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the universe, are challenged by this point of pale light.” Yet by contrast, the person who accepts Isaiah 45:18, that God “…did not create it in vain, Who formed it to be inhabited…” finds that that Earth’s unique position amplifies our significance, in that we are it among all, like a pearl or treasure. Earth is the universe’s sweet spot. When Isaiah wanted to encourage strength and hope, he implored “Lift up your eyes on high, and see who has created these things, Who brings out their host by number; He calls them all by name, by the greatness of His might and the strength of His power; Not one is missing” (40:26). Getting overwhelmed by the scale of things can either swallow one up in an impersonal, indiscriminate Nature, or get one lost—in a good way—in the magnificence of a personal, purposeful God.
Lastly, I find that my attempts at grasping through comparison lead me to the idea of the incomparable. Understand this: God is not “great” in the sense that he is a thousand million times bigger than the universe that he made, or that He can see inside all atoms at once. Rather, he is great in that He is transcends all this: the great, small, and time itself. Paul, elaborating on God’s glory, uses the peculiar statement “the foolishness of God is wiser than men, and the weakness of God is stronger than men” (1 Corinthians 1:25). This might be interpreted as saying that our wisdom and strength is on a scale with God’s, only that He is much superior. But that analysis doesn’t hold when God has no foolishness or weakness at all. I think what God is saying through Paul’s human analogy is that if God had foolishness or weakness (which He does not), it would yet be greater than our wisdom or strength. In other words, there is no comparison. As difficult it is to fully grasp the creation, how could we expect to grasp and elucidate in human language the One who contained it all as a thought before anything existed?
“To whom will you liken Me, and make equal and compare Me, that we should be alike?” (Isaiah 46:5) The implied answer, of course, is no one! In Psalm 139 David muses about God’s omniscience and omnipresence—specifically His intimate knowledge of David’s own life—and concludes “Such knowledge is too wonderful for me; It is high, I cannot attain it” (v. 6). Yet this does not lead him to self-centered loathing or pity about insignificance, but rather to the praise of God for what David does know: that God, shown in His works (including His special creation of humanity), is marvelous (v. 14).
© 2010 Chard Berndt.
All Scriptures NKJV.