To see the world in a grain of sand,
And Heaven in a wild flower,
Embrace infinity in the palm of your hand
And eternity in an hour.
– William Blake
How many grains of sand are there on the planet, and how many stars in the universe? Although the question is tautological – since at first glance the answer may seem unhelpful – the act of asking it is essential to glimpse the wonderful machinery of the universe.
A group of scientists in Hawaii set out to answer these two questions, and find out if there are more grains of sand than stars, or vice versa. To do this, they first postulated the average size of a grain of sand and the number of grains of sand that fit in a teaspoon. Then the number of beaches and deserts in the world. Multiplied all together, the number is shocking: 7.5 x 10 to the eighteenth power. In other words, 7 quintillion, 500 quadrillion grains.
Calculating the number of stars is even more complicated, since the boundaries of space are largely speculative. Scientists estimated the number of stars potentially observable by the (most powerful satellite telescope on the planet) and included everything that tinkles in the sky, from ordinary stars, quasars, red dwarfs and even entire galaxies. The result? 70 billion million million stars (and that’s just an estimate).
The implications of this answer are great. The Earth is a small planet in the context of the entire universe, and the fact that it contains so many grains of sand compared to the stars in the sky is inspiring, to say the least. The universe is as vast seen from close up as it is from afar. The Earth is a grain of sand of the inconceivable universe, which in turn contains millions and trillions of grains of sand. And William Blake said it: To see the world in a grain of sand and the sky in a wild flower, embrace infinity in the palm of your hand.
To finish off this research, the scientists asked themselves a third question: How many molecules are there in a drop of ? It turns out that it takes only 10 drops of water for the number of H2O molecules to equal the number of stars in the sky.
If you consider this information, the perspective of reality takes a tremendous turn. If a universe can fit in a drop of water, then perhaps everything we know is contained in a cosmic grain of sand or a droplet.
These types of questions, such as How much does a cloud weigh? They seem designed to make us reflect and tell us about existence from another perspective.