My world got a little bigger when I learned about "The World's Largest Collection of the Smallest Versions of Largest Things." It's an "interactive exposition devoted to roadside attractions" that's created, owned and operated by Erika Nelson who's also "one of America's foremost experts and speakers on the World's Largest Things." According to Atlas Obscura, she "travels the United States looking for 'monsters of the road' (things like the world's largest ketchup bottle or ball of yarn). She then photographs them and makes a World's Smallest Version of said World's Largest Thing …. For example, when replicating the world's largest ball of rubber bands, she used the miniature rubber bands you'd find at an orthodontist's office." However, many roadside largest things aren't actually true examples. While in Indiana for a Public Library Association conference, my wife and I visited the world's largest sycamore stump ("over 12 feet tall, 18 feet wide, and 57 feet in circumference!") in Kokomo, and the "car-sized basketball shoe" in New Castle that's really only a façade of the left half of a shoe and made of fiberglass, like most "largest" things. The first public library I worked at in Odessa, Texas featured an eight-foot-tall plastic jackrabbit that was the world's largest until a 14.5 foot one was fabricated for Ralls, Texas. The second public library I worked in Seguin, Texas was home of the world's largest pecan statue (six-feet, 1000, lbs.) until they were eclipsed by a 12-foot, 12,000 lb. monster pecan in Brunswick, Missouri. However, in 2011 the Seguin Chamber of Commerce retaliated with a new 16-foot behemoth.
Wondering about the largest real things led to Space.com who supplied the answers. First came "The biggest single entity that scientists have identified in the universe is a supercluster of galaxies called the Hercules-Corona Borealis Great Wall. It's so wide that light takes about 10 billion years to move across the entire structure. For perspective, the universe is only 13.8 billion years old. Space is all about large distances and objects. At 24,901 miles in circumference at the equator, Earth seems big to us, but the sun can hold over a million Earths. Old Sol's "puny compared to the biggest stars we know of. The sun is a G-type star or a yellow dwarf and a pretty average size on the cosmic scale. Some 'hypergiant' stars are much, much larger. Perhaps the biggest star known is UY Scuti, which could fit more than 1,700 of our suns."
On the flipside, revelations in Space.com's "What Is the Smallest Thing in the Universe" are somewhat murkier. Humanity's collective opinion of the smallest things have gone from grains of sand to atoms to their electrons and now to quarks, and "scientists don't know if they are the smallest bits of matter in existence, or if the universe contains objects that are even more minute." Then there are black hole singularities. "Another contender for the title of smallest thing in the universe is the singularity at the center of a black hole. Black holes are formed when matter is condensed in a small enough space that gravity takes over, causing the matter to pull inward and inward, ultimately condensing into a single point of infinite density." To measure these small distances physicists use the "Planck length," which is "1.6 x 10^-35 meters (the number 16 preceded by 34 zeroes and a decimal point) — an incomprehensibly small scale that is implicated in various aspects of physics."
It's easier to grasp small things on a human scale, like the "penny lick" that's described in Atlas Obscura. In the mid-1800s, when the popularity of ice cream surged in Britain, "ice cream vendors, or Jacks, served scoops in cups called penny licks". The small containers' thick glass bottoms magnified the small indentations into which jacks dabbed very small portions. "Even the tiniest dollop of ice cream appeared bountiful. During the penny lick's day, Englishmen had little conception of germs." After finishing their ice cream, customers handed back their well-licked penny lick, and the next customer ate from the same cup.
Germs are pretty small to us, even though we're packed with them. Many are good for us, and together they're known as the human microbiome. The National Library of Medicine states that those little creatures are "microbiota," or microbes, and the "microbiome" is "the catalog of these microbes," but the terms are often used interchangeably. The NLM added that "The human microbiota consists of the 10-100 trillion symbiotic microbial cells harbored by each person, primarily bacteria in the gut; the human microbiome consists of the genes these cells harbor." The Wikipedia article's a bit clearer. It says that microbiome comes from the Greek "mikros" (small) and "bios" (animal), and "is the aggregate of all microbiota that reside on or within human tissues and biofluids along with the corresponding anatomical sites in which they reside, including the gastrointestinal tract, skin, mammary glands, seminal fluid, uterus, ovarian follicles, lung, saliva, oral mucosa, conjunctiva, and the biliary tract. Types of human microbiota include bacteria, archaea, fungi, protists, and viruses. Though micro-animals can also live on the human body, they are typically excluded from this definition …. The number of bacterial cells in the human body is estimated to be around 38 trillion," while "the number of bacterial genes is estimated to be 2 million, 100 times the number of approximately 20,000 human genes."
TheGutHealthDoctor.com points out that "the gut is a key player in dictating your immunity. Your microbes essentially teach your immune cells what is worth reacting to and what is safe …. the gut and the brain are literally connected through hundreds of millions of nerves, known as the enteric nervous system. This often means that what's going on in your brain can influence what's going on in your gut and vice versa" and "Your gut microbes produce chemicals such as short chain fatty acids which essentially tell our body we've had enough." And this just scratches the surface of all those itsy microbiomes do for us.
The Greek philosophers liked to talk about atoms, but humans didn't begin to understand "small" until Antonie van Leeuwenhoek, "the father of microbiology," came along in the 1600s and discovered a way to make microscope lenses more powerful. He was a basket-maker's son in Delpht, and as his Berkley.edu biography stated, "had no fortune, received no higher education or university degrees, and knew no languages other than his native Dutch, but "succeeded in making some of the most important discoveries in the history of biology. It was he who discovered bacteria, free-living and parasitic microscopic protists, sperm cells, blood cells, microscopic nematodes and rotifers, and much more." A leading cloth merchant, Leeuwenhoek ("'layu-wen-hook' is a passable English approximation") read Robert Hooke's book "Micrographia" and was inspired to tinker with lens-making to better understand different types of thread. He made over 500 optical lenses, including some of the most powerful in the world, and while he kept his technique secret, it's been rediscovered. Leeuwenhoek made his best lenses by melting thin glass rods, stretching them into a thin "whiskers," and melting their ends until a tiny bead (.75 mm) formed that he mounted into little microscopes about two inches long. He possessed exceptional eyesight, and by putting specimens right next to the lens, placing it very close to his eye, and looking through the tiny bead's other side he discovered a new world of "dierkens" ("little animals" in Dutch). Florida State University provides a good example and explanation at https://micro.magnet.fsu.edu/primer/museum/leeuwenhoek.html. Leeuwenhoek became famous, (he was executor of painter Johannes Vermeer's will, and he demonstrated his regular ground lens microscopes to celebs like Peter the Great and William of Orange, but kept his bead microscope to himself. He died of a rare disease now known as "Leeuwenhoek's disease," which the most common presenting symptoms include dyspnea, hyperventilation, respiratory distress, and episodic abdominal movements. that's characterized by rapid, involuntary diaphragmatic contractions" that's caused by anxiety, perhaps that someone would discover his secret technique. Or maybe the pressure of being the town wine-gauger got to him. As described in the Lens on Leeuwenhoek site, "The problem came from liquids in barrels … Increasing the complexity, barrels were round. That made them easier to move, but quantities inside curves are harder to measure than quantities inside rectangles. The barrels could not be opened and unpacked like a basket." It required surveying skills and was a tough gig but he succeeded.
Adlai Stevenson said, "You can tell the size of a man' by the size of the thing that makes him mad." Tiny libraries make me glad, like the one inside a 110-year-old cottonwood in Idaho, the repurposed phone booth libraries in Britain, and German beer crate libraries, and the Chena Tool Library at 1917 Lillian Street here in Fairbanks. Like Ralph Emerson wrote, "I think no virtue goes with size."
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