The Powers of 10
Infinity means something that has no ending. Something that goes on and on without any limits. I don’t know exactly at what age I was introduced the idea of infinity, however, in the early ages, I was introduced the idea of God being infinite that God has no beginning and no ending, and He is the everlasting. When I was young, from religious perspective, I knew what infinity is, but I didn’t really understand the concept of infinity until I faced calculus in High School.
In mathematics, “infinity” is not a real number, it’s a symbol. When some numbers or series goes forever and ever, we say that it’s an infinity. I took a picture of a leaf. Now, we will take a trip by digging into the leaf, reducing the distances of travel by factors of 10. With the factor of 1o, we will see the mechanism of a single leaf/matter goes to infinity.
10^0 is our starting point which is a distance to a bunch of leaves in the garden. 10^-1 is getting closer at 10 cm. We can delineate the leaves. At 10^-2, it is possible to observe the structure of the leaf. At 10^-3, the cellular structures start showing. At 10^-4, the cells can be defined, and we can see the union between them. At 10^5, start our trip inside the cell. At 10^-6, the nucleus of cell is visible. At 10^-8, in this micro universe the DNA chain is visible. And it continues up to 10^-16. After this nowhere more to go at the limits of current scientific knowledge. After this, if scientist come up with more information about this matter, still this process has no ending. As a result, it goes to infinity.
The idea of powers of 10 from micro to macrocosmos was also introduced in the short film “Powers of 10” by Charles and Ray Eames. This film could also be found on Youtube.
