Quantum Galaxies

Every time I wonder why we spend (read:borrow) so much money on astronomy, along comes something like this (link):

"Galaxies are nothing but quantum mechanics writ large across the sky" - Brian Greene, Columbia University physicist.

Now I don't pretend to be an expert on quantum mechanics, but I remember my parents buying me a copy of "In Search of Schroedinger's Cat" when I was a still a kid, so I think that this all means something like this:

At the quantum level, teeny particles pop into existense all the time. I think they pop in with their anti-particle, then soon enough anti-particles and regular particles annihilate each other. So it all comes out in the wash.

But that's not really the point (I'd be an awful professor...).

So imagine you are a tiny tiny particle that has just popped into existence. Maybe you are pulled towards another particle nearby, which is pulled towards you (that gravity thing). You clump together. Of course, you aren't the only new particle, so there are lots of tiny clumps all around.

Now for the fun part.

You just happen to be popping up and clumping in the same trillionth of a second when the universe is supersizing itself. So instead of a big uniform smooth empty chilly universe (a big pitcher of cool tea), it's a big varied freezing universe with scattered bits of fiery clumps (a bowl of Lucky Charms with pop rocks candy in it?). All because of you. And you're not the size of a pinhead anymore. You're a galaxy, shaped like a pinwheel or a twist of DNA.

And it all looks like this.



Crazy. I love it.