Painting the Universe by the Numbers

Some people are clearly better working with words; other people are clearly better with numbers. All of us, however, have to at some point think about the huge universe that surrounds our lives and planet Earth if we want to add a cosmic dimension to our thought.  And modern science's knowledge of the universe cannot be explained without resorting to numbers in some fashion. That is especially true when it comes to talking about the age of the universe.

The human limitation we run into here is that we humans have not evolved with any instinctive need to comprehend the kinds of immense numbers modern astronomy must employ.  For example, I have a ready, physical sense of any number up to ten because of my having ten fingers.  But how do I have a gut sense of what a million is?  I know abstractly that it is 1000 x 1000, but I have a hard time envisioning one thousand of anything repeated a thousand times over.  The difficulty of comprehension is even greater when trying to truly grasp what a billion is.

Thus it is that some metaphor using words becomes handy.  You may have heard of one often-repeated metaphor of the entire age of the universe fitting into a 24-hour clock. Personally, that common model of a 24-hour clock gets me only a little way towards imagining the immensity of the universe's age.  One problem for me with it is that I don't have a mental picture of a clock containing 24 hours.  (Our traditional circular clock-faces only go up to 12.) Also, on clocks the numbers go round and round repetitively -- but the universe's age stretches out in linear fashion far into the past with no repetition.

the universe's timeline as a row of books

A better model for me has been presented by the contemporary Christian evolutionary theologian John Haught.  He uses the model of a set of books on a shelf, something that I, with my literary bent, can more readily imagine.  Haught explains:  "Imagine that you have thirty large volumes.... Each tome is 450 pages long....  Let this set of books represent the scientific story of our 13.7-billion-year-old universe.  The narrative begins with the Big Bang on page 1 of volume 1, but the first twenty-one [of the 30] books show no obvious signs of life at all....  [L]ife doesn't appear until volume 22....  Even then, living organisms do not become particularly interesting... until almost the end of volume 29.  There the famous Cambrian explosion occurs....  Only during the last sixty-five pages of volume 30 [the last volume] does mammalian life begin to flourish....  [M]odern humans do not appear until the bottom of the final page."

With this picture in my mind, one thing in particular stands out:  That immense gap between the beginning of our universe and when life finally emerges out of formerly inorganic molecules.  Although I know it is my human-centered viewpoint, I cannot help but think of that gap as a time of waiting -- the universe working and "waiting" to make life finally appear.  On the other hand, I can look at that relatively short time in which life on Earth has existed and see graphically the power of life itself.  It only required life to finally get started before it could take off, leading to millions of species in a relatively short time.

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Do you have any thoughts about humans' being such a short part of the universe's history?

(The Haught quote is from

 Christianity and Science by John F. Haught, © 2007, p. xii.)