Much as Francesco Berni dared to write verse in praise of chamber pots and the plague, I would similarly venture to say that inflation has brought at least one benefit, that of clarifying for us all the exact value of a million: a sum that is now within reach of nearly everyone’s budget, something that was hardly the case in Signor Bonaventura’s day.1 In fact, our ability to envision things is limited, and those who wish or need to convey to us how big very big things really are, or how small very small things are, invariably stumble over our age-old deafness to these things, as well as the inadequacy of everyday language. Scientific popularizers in such fields as astronomy and nuclear physics have long known about this challenge, and they have tried their best to compensate for the inadequacy by availing themselves of paradox and proportion: if the sun were to shrink to the size of an apple . . . if a billion years were compressed to the length of a single day. . . .
The educational value of these contrivances can vary within quite wide margins, and depends above all on their elegance: if that fails, the reader is left with the same sense of frustration he felt when reading the bare facts. Defying these dangers, an elderly Dutch scientist has set off with youthful audacity down the path of paradox and astonishing equivalencies—beyond the bounds of the absurd—driven by the urge to show us just how odd the universe around us is, even in the aspects whose oddness is disguised by routine.
In a book published many years ago, but still useful, R. Houwink (one of the world’s leading experts in the field of polymers and rubber) indulged in the sheer fun of gathering a few hundred curiosities from the realms of astronomy, particle physics, biology, and economics; it is called The Odd Book of Data (Amsterdam: Elsevier, 1965), and it admonishes us from the introduction onward to focus on orders of magnitude: nanoseconds, which these days we toss off without a second thought when talking about computers, are extremely short spans of time; there are as many nanoseconds in a second as there are seconds in thirty years.
Astronomy is the domain of “astronomical numbers,” and we all know, at least in qualitative terms, that there are lots of stars, but the image that Houwink provides is far more eloquent, as well as being easier to remember: in our galaxy alone, any human being who wishes to “get away from it all” would have the choice of thirty solar systems. To see a falling star strikes us as a fairly unusual spectacle, and we are astonished to learn that most of these “stars” are actually metallic or rocky particles smaller than a grain of millet; nonetheless, some 15,000 tons reach the Earth’s surface every day. If this invisible “dry rain,” which has probably been going on for as long as our planet has existed, were not constantly washed away by rain showers, it would have by now produced a layer of cosmic dust twenty meters deep.
We are as incapable of conceiving of the enormous size of stars as we are the infinitesimal smallness of particles; it is therefore helpful to learn that a teaspoonful of water contains as many molecules as the Atlantic Ocean contains teaspoonsful of water. Electrons orbit the atomic nucleus at speeds a hundred times as great as that of any missile launched by man, but when a one-ampere current flows through a conductor with a cross-sectional area of a square millimeter, the speed of the electrons’ forward motion is pathetic: twenty-five centimeters an hour, much slower than a line at a post office window. What is the diameter of these electrons? It is virtually pointless to reel off figures to a layman: far more picturesque to say that if Noah, in 3000 BC, had started stringing electrons on a thread at a rate of one a second for eight hours a day, today the chain would be two-tenths of a millimeter long.
It is well-known that plants grow by extracting the carbon they need not from the earth but from the air, and specifically by using the trace amounts of carbon dioxide found in the atmosphere. But it is stunning to learn that the carbon thus fixed every year, which is then the only carbon available in nutritional form for human beings and animals, is forty times as plentiful as the amount that over the same period of time is extracted from the world’s coal mines.
That the future of mankind ultimately depends on the way (rational, irrational, or plain crazy) that we cultivate our fields and manage our livestock can be seen from several illuminating data. For every human being there exist five hectares of dry land, but of those five hectares one hectare is too cold for cultivation, one too mountainous, one too barren, and one too arid; all that’s left is a single hectare per person, but at present only half this area is being exploited. A single American grain farmer produces an average of 100 kilograms of wheat per hour (though we are not told with what investments). To obtain this same result takes seventeen Chilean farmers, twenty-four Pakistani farmers, and fifty Japanese farmers; we are given no comparable data for Italy and the other European nations. Every year, a Danish cow will produce ten times the animal’s live weight in milk; an Indian cow will produce only twice its body weight but, because it is very lean, in absolute terms it gives only a tenth of the yield produced by the Danish cow.
It seems likely that certain numeric correlations are more than mere coincidence: it is calculated that the weight of bacteria in a hectare of topsoil of a fertile meadow is equivalent to the weight of the cattle that can be adequately supported on it. One cubic centimeter of this topsoil contains a population of microorganisms comparable to the human population of the planet: that same human population, if sufficiently compacted, could be fit into Lake Windermere, in England (roughly equivalent to Italy’s Lake Orta).
To the vexation of macrobiotics everywhere, and to the encouragement of the starving, we learn that seventeen volunteers, in the United States, lived for many months only on synthetically produced foods, which is to say, food produced by chemical processes, excluding animal or plant products entirely; at the conclusion of the experiment, all the subjects were found to be in excellent health. Therefore, one synthetic-food factory of moderate size could adequately feed the population of a large city; still, we’d like to know the results of a longer experiment, because the diseases caused by malnutrition manifest themselves only slowly.
Seen through Houwink’s eyes, our bodies take on surreal traits, either ethereal or earthly. A woman who supports her weight on one stiletto-heeled shoe exerts a pressure on the ground similar to that acting on the walls of an ordinary high-pressure steam boiler; the flow of air passing through our nose in the course of normal inhalation approximates wind force 2 of the Beaufort scale; but the levels of energy at play in the “auxiliary services” (that is, in our sensory and communication organs) are incredibly low. The power output of the sound produced by a man who talks for three hours a day throughout an average life span is roughly sufficient to heat a cup of tea, while the energy that could be extracted from a pea falling from a height of three centimeters, if converted entirely into light, would be enough to actuate the optic nerve of every human being who has ever lived.
Our brain is the most complex object that exists in the universe, but it requires no more energy to operate than is needed for a 100-watt lightbulb. We can add to this statement the observation that, just as in the case of the lightbulb, most of that energy dissipates in the form of heat; the share that is actually used for mental operations is minimal, and as far as I know it has not been measured as of this writing.
Each of the data taken from the field of economics is a tiny electroshock. A dollar invested at 4 percent compound interest in the year of Christ’s nativity would now have the value of a hundred thousand globes of solid gold, each the size of the Earth. As for that, it’s no longer correct to refer to gold as the most precious substance par excellence: plutonium is worth thirty times as much as gold, and the neutron is worth a million times as much. Nonetheless, if I may put in my own personal advice, I’d venture to discourage the reader from stockpiling either of these two materials; plutonium is radioactive and exceedingly toxic, while neutrons would be a terrible investment, because they have a half-life of about sixteen minutes. That is to say, if you purchased a kilogram of neutrons, there would be only 500 grams a quarter of an hour later, 250 grams after half an hour, 125 grams after forty-five minutes, and so on.
Our consumer civilization is actually a civilization of waste. An office clerk currently “produces” an average of two kilos of wastepaper a day, which contain more calories than are required to nourish him and his wife. In the industrialized nations, trucks that are sent to the junkyard may have lost no more than 0.1 percent of their original weight. It costs roughly the same, in terms respectively of ink and fuel, to write for a kilometer with a ballpoint pen and to drive for a kilometer in a car, not including the salaries of author and driver.
The book provides us with about two hundred such pieces of information. They range from the elegant to the frivolous and the grotesque, but not one of them is useless: they’re all meant to show us something about the world we live in, that is, to give us a clearer idea of it; but in many cases “showing” actually means making it evident to us that we are unable to envision certain objects and phenomena at all (the same is true of God, according to certain religions). Our imagination is the same size as we are, and we have no way of stretching it any further. Classical physics, too, is made to our measure; in order to descend into the heart of an atom, or climb into intergalactic space, we need another kind of physics, where intuition is no longer any help, and is indeed a hindrance. For laymen like us, the only instrument that will allow us to catch a glimpse of what lies outside our own boundaries are these “odd data.” They aren’t science, but they’re an encouragement to learn it.
1. Signor Bonaventura is the title character of a famous Italian comic strip that began in 1917; every misadventure leads to his winning a million lire.