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The powers of 10 and the human body
| May 31, 2013 | Posted by News under Design inference |
Recently, we noted cicadas’ apparent predilection for the prime numbers of 13 and 17.*
Do we have a predilection for powers of ten?
* Too bad mosquitoes don’t share it. If we had all that time to prepare …
Incidentally, one argument against the Darwinian explanation for the cicada’s long prime-number hibernation (as a means of avoiding predators) is that so few life forms ever do that. You’d expect a strategy adopted for explicitly that purpose to be more common if it worked, because predators are almost universal.
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Here is an interesting piece of trivia to go with the ‘powers of ten’ video that HybridMedical has:
The preceding interactive (powers of 10) graph points out that the smallest scale visible to the human eye (as well as the size of a human egg) is at 10^-4 meters, which ‘just so happens’ to be directly in the exponential center of all possible sizes of our physical reality. i.e. 10^-4 is, exponentially, right in the middle of 10^-35 meters, which is the smallest possible unit of length, which is Planck length, and 10^27 meters, which is the largest possible unit of ‘observable’ length since space-time was created in the Big Bang, which is the diameter of the universe. This is very interesting for, as far as I can tell, the limits to human vision (as well as the size of the human egg) could have, theoretically, been at very different positions than directly in the exponential middle. As well, this exponential ‘coincidence’ is also interesting since conscious observation keeps turning out to be a integral, non-negotiable, part of measurement within quantum mechanics:
Moreover, the magnitude to which Leggett’s inequality was violated was staggering to learn about: