The Universe

"We still do not know one thousandth of one percent of what nature has revealed to us." - Albert Einstein

Earth as an Atom in a Pumpkin Vine - Dall·e AI

The universe is willing to teach you anything you want to know about it - all you have to do is listen.  This is my current understanding of the universe as learned through the garden.  As with anything in life, it is subject to change upon new (and constant) learning.  A mind should be like sand - constantly shifting and morphing as the tides roll in and out, always dynamic, never static.

When you stare at an object long enough or spend enough time in one location, a strange thing starts happening, you start seeing similarities and correlations.  Whether these actually exist or it's just your mind constantly trying to make sense of things is certainly up for debate.  However there is a difference between thinking of a theory and experiencing a theory.  When those two collide is where the magic happens.

The structure of corral reefs, plant roots, tree branches, and lightning.  The structure of nautilus shells, sunflower seeds in the sunflower, Romanesco broccoli, hurricanes, and galaxies.  What does each set of objects have in common?  Seemingly nothing until you look at them.  The structure of each is generally the same.  If you don't believe me (I applaud you if that's the case) then pull up photos of them on professor Google or get out in nature and see them for yourself.  Then you can be the judge.  These structures are called fractals.

What fractals teach us is that structures of the universe always repeat themselves from the very small up to the very large.  If a structure works well, it is recycled and reused.  Best to not re-invent the wheel if the wheel already works fabulously.

When a seed is planted, it's just a spec of what the final plant will be.  A pumpkin seed fits on the tip of your index finger yet the final plant can have several vines that span 30 ft (9 m) in length and will grow a handful of pumpkins, each of which weighing 20+ pounds (9+ kg).  Which is just baffling - much like our own universe.

Cover the seed in soil, water it and if the temperature and conditions are right, within a few days it will explode out, sprout and start expanding outward.  This is the big bang.

As the plant universe starts expanding, if you were to zoom in on it (or any object for that matter), you will find that it is made up of a bunch of atoms and in-between the atoms is mostly a bunch of empty space.  These are the stars and universe.

Atoms themselves are actually mostly blank space with electrons whirling around the proton/neutron nucleus (what has all the mass) in what are called quantum orbitals.  Much like how the planets revolve around the sun.  Electrons paths are a lot less predictable though and are more like how quasi-moons behave.  Earth has quasi moons that have a loose orbit around earth but the gravity of all of the other objects in space have an affect on the quasi-moon and thus it's orbit, making their orbits hard to predict - much like how it's hard to predict the orbit of electrons.

As the plant grows bigger and bigger it pulls in nutrients through its roots and carbon from the air to aid its growth.  Plants breathe in carbon dioxide, which is what we exhale and it happens to be an invisible, colorless, and odorless gas.  You, the Earth and all of the universe also happens to be surrounded by an invisible energy called dark matter and dark energy.

Everything that we can currently account for in the universe (all mass and light) is estimated to make up only about 5% of the universes total energy.  That is 5% of the universe that we can currently explain and 95% that modern science cannot explain.  95% is a pretty big number, especially for how advanced we consider ourselves.  Of that 95%, about 68% is thought to be Dark Energy and about 27% is thought to be Dark Matter.

Perhaps Earth is just a single atom inside of a giant pumpkin plant and when we look at the stars at night we're really just observing other atoms, all within the same plant and expanding out to support the larger structure.  From our universes beginning until this point in time could be just a second in the life of the larger plant even though it has been about 13.8 billion years from our perspective.  After all, time is relative.  Or we could be 5 seconds into the life of the plant or 1 week in, who knows.  Perhaps the pumpkin plant we're inside of is part of a larger world much like our own and perhaps that world is also just an atom within another pumpkin plant that is within another world, etc.

Outside of the pumpkin plant there are other plants, which would be parallel universes that are on our own scale.  If you look at a field of grass, it's just a bunch of individual blades of grass all packed closely together and all growing.  They grow individually of each other, yet their roots are connected.  No two blades of grass will be the exact same, there will be slight differences from one to the next.

If we ever stumble across parallel universes, we'll likely find they are very similar to our universe yet uniquely their own and they are connected to our universe and each helps each other grow.

That's enough mind bending thinking for one day.  If you want to have your own mind bending thought experiments remember that all you have to do is get outside, observe and be open to learning.  Nature is the greatest teacher but only to those who want to learn.

Keep it real!