It seems like dark matter wouldn’t really be a part of this scale but rather an adjacent thing that influences matter at all levels… is that correct?
I’m also trying to figure out how to fit time, energy, and antimatter into the picture. Hmm.
Oops, I didn’t mean the sub-points in that section to be arranged by size, but rather a list of the different things the same clumps of stardust could conceivably arrange themselves into. And – please correct me if I’m wrong – aren’t planets and stars the result of clouds/nebulae coalescing into solids and plasmas?
Ooh, ooh, ooh! Yes, adding biological systems would make this so much more interesting! Unfortunately, I don’t know anything about biology or anatomy beyond (molecule -> DNA -> cell -> body part -> lifeform). Could you elaborate on this, please?
I’d welcome any popular/sound enough hypotheses, but I’ll also make a note of their speculative statuses.
For some relative size comparison, here’s a web-based scale model of the solar system, and here’s one for a single hydrogen atom.
For some introduction, there’s this excellent video visualizing DNA processes – replication, protein production etc. It’s been linked to a couple of times from this board, and I’m awed by it every time I see it again.
I think clouds of interstellar gas would typically be larger than star/solar systems.
There are globular clusters and other groups of stars that would be smaller than the galaxies.
Spiral galaxies have arms, which could be called structures on a sub-galactic scale. The arms have spiral shells of stars, sort of like the inner partitions of Nautilus shells, or like the scoops on bucket wheel excavators. Though, I learned this last bit in a course on galactic structure I took in about 1980 and have never heard of it anyplace else. No cite.
Planets do result from at least some nebulae, so I could see it in that order, I guess.
There’s probably a few ways to break it down. Usually, living systems have two levels of molecule: monomers and polymers. DNA consists of four nucleotides repeated billions of times; proteins consist of peptides repeated many times.
Then there are multi-molecule complexes. Many key proteins are actually several molecules held together by weak electrostatic, hydrogen or sulfur bonds. Membranes are another sort of complex, mostly made of small molecules aligned based on hydrophilia/hydrophobia (like the way a drop of oil stays together on top of water).
After that, you’ve got cells, tissues (groups of cells of the same type), organs (groups of tissues that work together) and organisms (groups of organs, at least for the higher life forms). Some people expand the hierarchy to include populations (groups of the same species) and ecosystems (groups of different species), but I’m not sure I’d go that far with it.
Well, they could modify the sequence so that when they start to zoom back in to the Carbon atom, it’s one located in the female picnicker’s cleavage instead of the man’s hand…
Seriously, that seemed like some nice seemless zooming both in and out in that video, and as stated it was well before CGI was commonplace, so it’s pretty impressive.
I was going to suggest dropping #1 and #12 as well, but…
In that case I would suggest including strings, as they are being heavily researched and are favoured by most physicists as the most likely next big theory.
On the other hand, parallel/mulltiple universe theories at this point are mostly idle speculation though (with math). If you polled phycisists I don’t know if the majority would give you a gut feeling that those theories will lead to a better description of reality (My point being that I don’t think it meets your “popular/sound enough hypothesis” criteria).
The string model is considered the most likely candidate for a theory of quantum gravity, but that’s damning with faint praise: It sucks, but all of the other proposed ideas suck just as much or more.
