Our days often feel like they are ruled by numbers in the most mundane ways. They tell you how late you’ll be for work, how much interest you’re paying on your mortgage, and how old you’ll be when you finally pay it off. But numbers can also be exhilarating. To me, a cosmologist, the most fantastical numbers have meanings far beyond the scope of our monotonous everyday lives. There is also What unites them is the ability to uncover the secrets of how the universe works and, most excitingly, the deep and meaningful mysteries that continue to confuse physicists today. has five of the best.
Ten-120 : Why is the vacuum energy so small?
To get an idea of how small this number is, imagine shrinking a person to the size of a proton and then shrinking it by the same ratio a total of 8 times.Miniature human left is 10-120 Double the original size. This is many orders of magnitude smaller than the Planck length, the basic unit of distance for which space in the classical sense makes no sense.
Exponentially small or large ratios between sizes are rare in nature, and when that ratio occurs, physicists seek an explanation. of course there is no human 10-120 Twice the size of a typical human, but comparing the observations to quantum field theory, the best and best tested theory of the universe, shows this very small number. More specifically, when you start thinking about vacuum energy, it comes up…
