Too Small

How many times have we heard that the Universe is enormous, and we are just a small atom in the midst of it all? Our existence is merely a fraction of time. Yet, this insignificance does not deter us from doing something meaningful in life beyond simple Epicureanism. There is this sense of continuity, an influence of the present on a distant future. Is that disguised as curiosity, fame, competition, or perhaps an exaggerated Epicureanism?

When I was confronted with the Theories of the Big Bang, Big Crunch, Infinite Expansion, I never had a reaction of awe but rather immense terror and a total loss of my significance. After all, what is the point, if in the end, we are all doomed to either boil or freeze in minimal density!? But surprisingly, the worries of daily life, this appetite to be busy ants, always push these theories of everything and nothing to the back of our minds.

We carry on with our lives, our projects and goals, disappointments, and sadness, all those insignificant concepts on a Universal scale. However, I cannot be overwhelming and consider this behavior of the masses as trivial (since not all of us ask why we are here) because there is nothing wiser than the behavior of time. There must be something more, something that gives us perspective in this panoply of dimensions.

One day, I read in an introductory book for young people by Fernando Savater about Bertrand Russell's Paradox of Groups. In which, the solution to the paradox lay in the existence of different levels of understanding that coexist. My idea is to apply these levels to the greatness of the Universe, from the smallest scales to the largest. And to understand that we live in dimensions without a priority of importance. Yes, a particle influences an entire system just as the largest particle can be irrelevant to the same system. It is this symmetry that leads me to consider the very small and the very large with equal importance because the very large, applied to the extreme, has no oriented meaning.